Tag: Social Media

The transition from Sci-fi to Sci-fact.

Posted by Rich Harris – December 20, 2011

I don’t know when these things will happen (probably not in my life time), what they will look like, or who will be involved, but all the pieces are now there technologically to achieve any of this. I don’t think the result of what I’m talking about will be like the Terminator movies, THX 1138 or Back to the Future II.

I do think however you’re going to see a world where we frown on excessive amounts of means to get to the desired end. We will get to the point where we cringe at the mere thought of having to factor in too much time and effort spent on the “how” versus the quality and experience of the end result.

With people generating so much content and data about themselves and thousands of algorithms across all types of network platforms and apps making use of human patterns, we make what used to be a futuristic movie idea into a reality. It’s happened before on smaller scales and it’ll continue to happen at an exponentially more rapid pace, year over year.

Down the road….

Personal profile data will be more valuable than we ever thought possible. It will redefine our entire economy, and political structure. It will dismantle and dilute thousands of years of regional cultural traditions across the globe in a fraction of the time it took for them to become what they are today. Over time, every new generation born into the data driven world will care less and less about their ethnicity and culture and more about being entertained and stimulated as quickly as possible with as little effort.

Personal profile data will be bought and sold at a level that far transcends anything any social network could have dreamed up. There will be large black and white markets for personal data that make organizations like Anonymous and Wikileaks look like little kids on a playground, digging around their lunch boxes for treats. The competition for ownership and control of personal data will be the new War on Drugs.

All data will be part of a centralized system – search queries, geo-location/GPS patterns, content upload/download habits, emails, personal and professional online calendars, shopping/consumer trends – of every individual. Eventually it won’t be considered offensive or inappropriate because it’ll just be part of what we are and do and make and consume. Like my generation born into TV’s and automobiles, future generations will be born not knowing what a non-data, non-digital world looks like.

There will be human-esque robots with a Siri-like system built in that records voice patterns when spoken to by its owner. It will learn moods, inflection, etc. so it can make adjustments so that your day goes as smooth as possible.

Siri-like technology will be built into the work we do in certain industries and on a grand scale.

Neighborhoods full of track homes with built-in verbal command systems to run appliances, make coffee, order your groceries for delivery, turn lights/temp on or off, etc. will start popping up and the airwaves will be filled with real estate ads touting the latest generation of “innovation homes.” As a result industries will crumble and new ones will be born. For example, who would need to purchase light switches anymore or dimmers or all the other tactile stuff currently used in the home?

Corporate websites will look like digital ghost towns as they are replaced by branded feeds, mobile apps and channels into your home, transportation and places of employment.

Just like everything else, old generations will deem it ‘bad’ or a ‘loss’ or ‘scary’ or ‘forgetting what’s really important’. New generations will deem it ‘good’ and ‘normal’ and will perceive the older generations as ‘old folks who don’t get it’.

I don’t think any of this is bad or good, it just is.

The Internet is stressing me out.

Posted by Rich Harris – September 22, 2011

Welcome to the era of news redefined where the line between important and useless has been dissolved completely. It’s up for grabs and it’s stressing me out. News, generally speaking, is stressing me out.

I’m not worried about bad news regarding crime or natural disasters. I’m not afraid of news about the Dow Jones or the shitty economy. News about poverty, war and suffering feel about normal these days so I’ve given them a permanent home in my brain. It’s a good thing I did because every time someone gets stabbed or shot, I read thousands of tweets about it. Every time a tornado destroys a decades old small town in minutes erasing countless lives, I read hundreds of blog posts about it in less than an hour. Every time the investors gnash their teeth because they didn’t heed the analysts that were right about their future, my RSS reader explodes the news all over the face of my iPad from hundreds of different sources around the web.

News used to be just news. It used to be simple, like a cup of coffee in the 1950′s. While I’m not afraid of the news itself, I am however starting to feel the burn of excessive noise levels whenever anything happens anywhere in the world. Sometimes I wonder if the reason we weren’t born into a technological world in the beginning of man’s existence is because we weren’t physiologically, mentally or emotionally designed to handle the result of our own innovations, destined to eventually fill our lives as they do today.

I struggle to feel present sometimes because my head is full of constant headlines from around the world, spanning hundreds of topics every hour. Everything is a headline now. We even invented a tool for communicating that uses nothing BUT headlines (Twitter). Lately when I connect to the internet I feel like the guy who eats food until he pukes and then keeps eating and puking, eating and puking, over and over. Every time I turn on my MacBook, my iPad, my iPhone, the television, my Xbox, news pours in like a dam bursting.

The problem isn’t that there is too much news. The problem is that there are too many people repeating the news ad infinitum. The innocent and innate desire of the connected masses to create, their intent to inform and share, has constructed the largest communication echo chamber we have ever witnessed as a species in an environment known as the Internet. The new and improved value of “breaking news” has concocted a fierce global competition on a personal and individual level, a race to be the “first to share.” Hopefully trying to keep up to stay “current” isn’t going to cause a social meltdown at some point.

Nowadays, when I hear about a “developing story,” instead of waiting on baited breath, I anxiously wince at the thought of opening a Twitter client, checking news via RSS feed or watching the cascading content waterfall of strong opinions that will make up the bulk of my Facebook news feed that day.

Social media makes news consumption feel like the “World News” version of that scene in Office Space when character Peter Gibbons (played by Ron Singleton) is asked 8 times by 8 different people, “Did you get the memo Peter? The one about the TPS reports?” It’s like walking into the television section at BestBuy and then turning on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC across all 60+ TV’s displayed on the retail floor at full volume, all while you stand in the middle of it and just stare.

I worry a lot about the humans and wonder from time to time if we are capable of healthily processing all this input.

I’m not yet convinced.

Onward.

The Self-Authorization of Our Own Digital Cloning

Posted by Rich Harris – September 9, 2010

After the launch of Facebook Places, and seeing it show up as part of my most used social app, Facebook, I was reminded of something that is becoming increasingly important for us to realize and remember. We are witnessing the early stages of the ultimate convergence of sociology, human behavior, and billions of data packets sailing over millions of miles of network cables. Like it or not, Facebook is bigger in concept and theory than Mark “The Zuckster” Zuckerberg could ever understand, bigger than the ‘original internet’ ever had a shot at being, now that data is finally able to be humanized.

One almost humorous observation I’ve made is that the same people who complain or are fearful of this are the same ones that are also contributing to it, whether they realize it, like it, hate it, or not. Every time you update your status about what you had for dinner, your struggles as a parent, how much you like your job, when you last went to Disneyland and how fun it was, etc. –  algorithms collect, organize and attempt to construct a ‘virtual you’ over time period that can be stored in a multitude of ways, deconstructed by ad agencies and reconstructed as needed to serve you content that they hope will be as close to your heart strings as possible. Because you have provided the data about yourself from your own brain and fingertips, this content statistically has a higher and higher percent chance of resonating with you as time goes on after they measure your continued responses. As we continue to voluntarily provide more insight into our likes, dislikes and fears. We are constructing a virtual version or copy of humanity in the form of patterns that fill up a multitude of databases. Unless you are in high-tech, this happens without the majority of us even realizing it because we are distracted by our own emotions and the day to day stresses of life and onslaught of news feeds that now pour in from every direction. We also aren’t taught to think about the web that way.

I’m sure I sound like a whack job (and to some extent I am) but a simpler way to describe it is this (I’m sure most of you have seen this before): When you see a new animated movie come out like Avatar, their goal is to as accurately as possible, recreate realistic human physical motion and movement so that the characters look as authentic as possible and are believable. In a production studio, they do so by making the actors wear a body suit covered in sensors that connect up to a computer program. They then have the actor do certain movements for the movie to support various scenes, etc. While they are moving around, the sensors are recording these movements and it creates a 3D image of those movements on the screen, completing a virtual version of that person and their physical/movement characteristics. The social monopolization of the web is doing the exact same thing except it’s with human behavior on a global scale. By creating an account on a social network or site so that we can willingly populate it with content from our daily lives and true selves, we have officially authorized the creation of digital clones of us as a species by companies so that it can be utilized for business and science.

Fortunately, computers aren’t capable of creating emotion via chemicals and hormones by the nanosecond like we are so ‘rise of the machines’ ain’t happening anytime soon….but hey, it’s fascinating shit.

Onward.

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.

Second Harvest Food Bank Gets Social

Posted by Rich Harris – June 25, 2010

Second Harvest Food Bank has been around since 1972 and has raised 125 million pounds of food since it began it’s mission. Today, it’s one of the largest charities combating hunger in the continental United States. SHFB for years has always built their network and team members from the ground up, by word of mouth. In this day and age, the tools available for non-profits like SHFB, can build that following 50 times as fast. Sites & tools like Facebook and Twitter are both amazing environments for fostering awareness for charities and spreading the good word of helping others quickly and virally. In Santa Cruz, CA, local business man of 25+ years Danny Keith has recently accepted a spot working for SHFB, providing guidance and a strategy for utilizing today’s social media communication channels to spread the word.

47Project: So who are you and what do you do for Second Harvest Food Bank?

DK: My name is Danny Keith, I founded Grind Out Hunger with Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County and I am most recently the Development Officer for Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County.

47Project: How are you using social media to help the SHFB raise awareness?

DK: In my day job the realization of becoming the voice for your brands so your community can drive your message and support or alter it based on how they see your brand. I applied these same principals when I launched http://www.grindouthunger.org and I found that the laws of social apply universally across all aspects. After an extremely successful year with Grind Out Hunger in 2009 and the subsequent traditional and social media it received, I then begin to analyze the existence of of TheFoodBank.org’s website and realized it needed a voice. They already had started a Facebook Fan Page and were using YouTube, Twitter and Vimeo moderately. I came in and syndicated all to cross pollinate each other and create a circle of social. We then branded and begin to implement the push, while bringing the social items directly to the front page of the website. At this point the creation of a WordPress Multi-User platform to set the stage for Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County to become their own media channel through http://www.thefoodbank.org all while tying in the social activity to tell the story.

47Project: Has it been a challenge trying get online communities to follow SH F B and it’s initiatives? If so, why do you think?

DK: Actually it has been well received, and honestly taken off virally allot quicker than some of my for profit ventures. Non-profits in general are doing such great things at a frequency that creates the need for social even more. Non-profits really are their own best media outlet.

47Project: What have been some of your biggest social media successes so far?

DK: With Second Harvest Food Bank it was the rapid acquisition of fans through our Facebook Fan Page http://www.facebook.com/secondharvestsantacruz from 300 users to over 1000 within 5 weeks.

47Project: What is the end result you are hoping for after all is said and done?

DK: To tell the story loud and proud…Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County has been on the forefront in the non-profit sector distributing half of its monthly distribution as fresh fruits and vegetables (one of the few food banks in the Nation to lay such claim) while also working with agencies to simplify the processes to get help within the community (On staff WIC and Food Stamp agents help with the process) and educating the recipients of the food around the importance of nutrition. All while servicing over 180 different food distribution agencies within Santa Cruz County. Alarmingly allot of this great work was under exposed mainly due to lack of a social channel to promote it to the community that it services.  Raising money is aˇlways the focus at Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County, the “ask” is happening differently now. What used to be a mail in donation or a face to face has become electronic, anonymous and instant. My goal is to increase the micro ask (individuals donating $1 to $10) electronically to support the expanding need Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County is experiencing.

47Project: Are there any SHFB events or announcements you’d like to mention?

DK: Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County has divided its year in two. 1st half of year is scheduled Food For Children and then second half of the year is Holiday Food Drive. I would just implore people to take a moment and reflect on the hardships others are experiencing, especially around food insecurity. Please donate if you can whether it be food, money or your time…it all makes a difference.

For More Information:

Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz on Facebook

GrindOutHunger.org

FeedingAmerica.org

Humanize Your Business Or Fail

Posted by Rich Harris – June 16, 2010

The old school of thought, because historically consumers were so easily wow’d by bright colors and one-way marketing messages, is that the top priority of  your marketing efforts should revolve around your products or services, what they do, what it’s gonna cost them, and why you are the best choice over your competitors and their products or services……oh yeah, and how rad your logo is.

Because profitability for any business comes from human beings making the decision to invest in you or your company, I believe that the old school is now officially backwards and can almost be hurtful to your cause. In the last year or so, the concept unearthed, thanks in large part by the social aspect of the web, is that companies need to spend more time using their market research and user group studies to construct a strategy around presenting their offering as an integral part of someone’s life, rather than as a “great product or service at a great price.”  The “Hey look at me! Look at me!” syndrome that so many companies and business people fall into when they don’t know what else to do with their time and budgets and feel like nothing else was working, is no bueno.

Like It Or Not, Warm Fuzzies = Revenue

I’m not saying the quality of the products or services aren’t a priority. Hell, they have to be if they’re are to successfully become a part of someone’s life, solidifying their purchase decision to make that initial investment in their relationship with you, ensure customer loyalty and retention, and increase the frequency of word of mouth (now more valuable than ever). I’m just saying that assuming quality is already there, the next step is to make sure you are a part of your customer, not just someone they handed over money to for products or services.

If you want to know what I’m talking about, just watch Apple. Love them or hate them, Apple knows how to create the notion that their technology products are seamlessly already part of who you are as a person. The concept of the iPad, and the iPad itself, is a perfect example. It doesn’t matter if you are selling car insurance, lamp shades, financial advice or skateboards, make sure that the presentation layer of your marketing plan does the following:

  • Think about a meaningful situation or experience that is most common among your market segment.
  • Assess which vehicle (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, blogs) they use most to consume information about your product/service type.
  • Storyboard a campaign that revolves around said meaningful situation/experience.
  • Keep your product (and even sometimes your brand in certain cases) as a background focus of your campaign, the whole time.

The above is how I would handle marketing/campaign methodology in this day and age. Catering to people’s emotions is nothing new in Marketing. Catering to segmented human emotion in a way where they can also interact with you and quickly, followed by easily doing business with you immediately, is new, thanks to the technology and tools. Pull your weight in the relationship with your customer and they’ll stick it out with you, even when your industry or company hit some rough spots.

Onward.

Social Media: The Agriculture & Farming Industry

Posted by Rich Harris – June 2, 2010

Jeff Fowle (@JeffFowle on Twitter) and I met at a Twitter conference in Seattle back in early March of this year. He’s a mellow dude and one of the nicest guys I’ve met in a long time. He’s a farmer, Agvocate, family man and a social media guy. After chatting with him in Seattle, I was interested in knowing more about how an industry as organic as his could proliferate an era as digital as the current one. Jeff has been instrumental in doing just that.

I think his bio says it all: “Jeff Fowle is a third generation family farmer and rancher from Etna, California. He and his wife Erin and son Kyle raise registered Angus cattle, Percheron draft horses, warmbloods, alfalfa and alfalfa-grass hay and grain as a rotation. They also start and train horses for riding, jumping, and driving. Their family run ranch has incorporated many environmentally beneficial and water efficient technologies and management strategies.”

NOTE: Jeff was also the Twitterer of the week on last week’s episode of The Quick’n'Dirty Podcast. You can listen to the episode or read the recap.

Here’s the quick interview we did over email.

So who are you and what do you do?

I’m a 4th generation rancher & farmer, raising the 5th. We raise Angus and Hereford cattle, Percheron Draft horses, Warmbloods, Thoroughbreds, Quarterhorses, alfalfa hay, wheat & pasture.

Jeff, you and I met at 140tc in Seattle and your good friend Ray Prock (@RayLinDairy on Twitter) was explaining to me some of the complexities of farming. I had no idea. Do you get the sense that most consumers don’t know much about where their food comes from and how it got onto their dinner table?

Over 90% of Americans are at least 2 generations removed from the farm or ranch. This generational gap presents a situation where the average person no longer understands what is involved in order to get that food to their table, let alone a clear idea of where it came from.

What is the most common misconception about the farming industry and those that work in it?

I think the most common misconception is that “farmers don’t care.” Main stream media carries a few negative stories and assumption by the public is that “all of ag” is like that. Reality is that farmers & ranchers are great stewards of the land and livestock. It is in our best interest to keep the land healthy & productive for future generations and diverse wildlife. Also, livestock that is low stress & happy is healthier and produces more consistently.

How are you using social media to help the farming industry? Educational? Marketing?

I’m using SM for several purposes.

  1. To reach out to people who have questions about where their food comes from & how it is produced.
  2. Address mis-information being spread by those opposing agriculture.
  3. Learn what the perceptions are by the public.
  4. Learn from fellow producers across the country.
  5. Market my own products.

Has it been a challenge trying get the farming community to learn, use, and embrace tools like Twitter and Facebook?

The biggest challenge is overcoming the technology issues. Many farmers & ranchers are still on dial-up which makes most SM applications a challenge.  For those who do have access, its a matter of building confidence & helping them realize that there are folks who are interested in their story and learning how, what and why they do what they do.

What is Agvocacy and what is it about?

Agvocacy is simply the act of promoting agriculture. I believe that we need all types of production in order to meet the future needs of the people. Conventional, organic, natural, farmers markets all will play an important role in continuing to provide safe, wholesome and healthy food for future generations.

What kinds of changes have you seen in the farming industry’s communication culture since you started your social media push?

The biggest learning curve has been in relating to people. Due to mis-information and incorrect assumptions, many people have formed opinions about what we do. We must first listen to their concerns and understand why they believe what they do. Once we understand their perspective we can then discuss their questions rationally and eliminate or at least reduce the likelihood of a confrontation occurring. It is paramount to remain professional and civil in all conversations. Farmers and ranchers have become very cautious and almost numb to attacks, so this is a sign of progress, being able to engage with the public, share the story and have mutual respect.

Any events or announcements you’d like to mention?

The AgChat Foundation will be having some announcements of upcoming events in the next couple of weeks. They will be announced on Twitter, Facebook & also on our website agchat.org.



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.

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.

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

Does Your Company Have a “Reputation” for Engagement?

Posted by Rich Harris – April 20, 2010

There are lots of new companies that were born into the era of social media. They have a full-on reputation for customer engagement and interaction. It is expected of them by their customers/audience and has been since they launched their website(s), blog(s) and Twitter account(s) and their company was spat out by the venture capital womb for all of us to check out. Social media influenced the initial business plan before they even launched. Hooray for them! Hooray for social media! Hooray for organic engagement! Hooray for BBQ sauce!

Training Day

However, SOME companies were not born in the age of social media. They make the best products *still* and are the leaders in their respective industries, have been around since the dawn of time, yet *still* offer a product or service that is relevant and in need. Just like you need to train your big ol’ company to shift to a culture of customer connect, engagement and transparency, you also need to possibly train your long time customers to start looking at your company along the same lines. In high tech, some of the original gangsters of silicon valley that still run the technological show on the back-end with less glamor and more of a solid backbone than almost any other tech company around (Oracle, Intel, etc…) may or may not have had a reputation for direct customer interaction over the past couple decades. So for those that haven’t, while their products or services are best-in-class and their customers know it (these custies show these brands decades of loyalty), these customers still have established an engagement status quo with them when it comes expected direct communication and involvement. If you are a long running big company trying to stay at the forefront of the new customer culture, there’s a chance you may have some work to do. There may be some serious re-shaping and molding of the minds and hearts that needs to take place.

Give The People What They Want

If you have a good product or service that fills a unique void/gap, you’ve already won the battle. To win the war in today’s landscape, you need to leverage social media channels to embrace your interactions with your customers in a way that makes them not only invest in you when things are good, but also want to work with you on improving your reputation when your company is at a low point. They need to have some sort of incentive that drives them to want to be along for the full ride as a customer (an investor, really).

Here are some ideas that I or someone else has thought of to stir the proverbial customer pot a little bit to help get your audience more involved:

Contests/Giveaways

  • There isn’t a human being on the planet who doesn’t like to be the benefactor of “free”. Throw down some dough for something people really want, a great product that 1000′s would want for free yields you at least a small pile of opt-in leads for hardly any cost. These are people you can connect with on some level and begin conversations with, retraining them in the new way that your company interacts with them, setting a new standard. Make the requirements for a contest such that they have to comment or start a discussion to be entered to win.

Feedback

  • Polls – There are so many easy to use/setup polls on Facebook and widgetized polls to embed on any website/blog now. Keep ‘em short and sweet and construct questions give off the transparent open-minded “we’re here for you” aesthetic and be genuine about it.
  • Request public opinions on your product or service or perception by publishing a sincere letter on behalf of the company as a “Note” on Facebook. Let people fire away. Delete the content containing expletives or blatant disregard and read the rest intently. You might unearth all kinds of stuff from your customers that you hadn’t ever realized.
  • No one knows how to fill a particular void than the ones you are trying to sell to: Your customers! Run public discussions on Facebook or a blog. People like to say nice things, but they LOVE to complain, and that’s your nugget. Complaints are your ammo to improve your company. Turn a negative into a positive. The objective byproduct of their complaints are that your company makes a better product, provides a better service, fills a need.

Events

  • Host several small tweetups focused on a very specific and known demographics. It’s cheap and you’ll learn more in 2 hours about people than you would in 7 days of doing ‘social media’ from your computer. There’s not a dollar figure on the planet that holds a candle to this stuff. What you learn here will translate into more thoughtful and calculated social media risks as opposed to the shotgun blast approach that most use social media for.
  • If your company is sponsoring or showing at an event, invite people (current and potential clients alike) from all over to simply just ‘stop by’ and say hello. Shake some hands. Those events have hand sanitizer everywhere now so get your networking on to allow potential new markets and customers to start buzzing around your scene.

Recycle Your Customers

If your customers aren’t used to you using social media or engaging them directly, it doesn’t mean they don’t want to and that you can’t change that. You don’t need to trade them in for new ones. After all, more often than not they’ve invested in you so anything new you do for them, or any new amount of time you invest in them, is all gravy, which makes switching to your new customer relationship from the old, pretty painless. Recycle them for use into the next chapter of your company.

Onward.

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.

The Tweditorial Calendar

Posted by Rich Harris – April 2, 2010

There Is So Much To Do

Ok so I’m kinda burnt out on the “Tw” words myself but today I’ve been a glutton for cliché. Let’s face it, if you are running the social media show for any medium to large business, there is an enormous, ever growing list of initiatives, ideas, objectives, strategies, metrics, and executions. Even the most organized person can’t herd all the social media cats 100% of the time. When you have product launches, contests, campaigns, big company announcements, and partnerships, it can get pretty gnarly trying to keep track of it all.

Fertilize Your Twitter Growth, Get Organized

If you’ve been in the marketing/PR game for awhile, the editorial calendar has been your bible for content/campaign planning, organization, and delivery. If you are managing the social side of marketing campaigns that have complex schedules, several moving parts, Twitter is no exception. As you scale and fine tune your marketing efforts, your Twitter footprint might grow into multiple accounts representing global regions, multiple market segments and sub-segments, or it might be one account leveraging several partner content pieces that adhere to a multi-prong timeline to engage customers. Either way you slice it, at some point your Twitter execution, if done right and is showing success and growth, is gonna need it’s own prominent real estate on your calendar next to everything else. There are three primary types of tweets that I use that need a spot on my calendar. I’ll cover them below.

Maintenance

Millions of people see millions of tweets each day. Millions of people also miss millions of tweets each day, some of which they would’ve probably like to have seen (pre-sale concert tix, plane tix, hotel one day only pricing, other promos, etc.). I used to consider duplicate tweets from the same company’s account to be spammy so I avoided doing that on behalf of my current company. However, now that noise reduction is a requirement for businesses on Twitter, whether they are sifting through the noise for leads and prospects or they are responsible for contributing to the noise, hoping that the right person is noticing, 1 promotional tweet gets lost in less than a nanosecond. The issue with that is that there might be someone following your company that really would like to have seen that tweet if you just gave them a second (or third) chance to know about it. With that said, not only have I decided that it’s ok to duplicate a tweet here and there, I’ve also seen long time followers respond to the third duplicate of a tweet — proof that prior tweets had just passed them by. So much info, so few characters, so many tweets, so little attention span and time.

What I’m getting at with this is that it’s ok to have a cautious set of scheduled duplicate regular tweets that go out to let new and old followers know that you are on Facebook, or that there’s a contest running, or that this product just launched, or that you’d like to hear their opinion on something pertaining to your company. Due to the sheer volume of retweets when news hits or when great content pops up and everyone wants to share, we’re all getting a little more patient with the ebb and flow of duplicate content and most tweeps really know now when a company is a truly spammy misguided automated entity or not, by the track record with their engagement and content type/frequency. So get your weekly, bi-weekly or monthly maintenance tweets on your calendar where it makes sense. An example of types of tweets that fall into this category are: “Be sure to check us out on LinkedIn for small business talk <LINK>” or “How are we doing on Twitter? Contact us here <LINK>” .

Events

An event can be anything for a company – a product/site launch, a new service, a customer story, breaking news, quarterly financial results call, leadership change or an acquisition, to name a few. I don’t need to explain why this need to be on your calendar. Events can feel easy. There’s a nice hard date associated with it (usually) so you can wrap everything you do around it. From a social media perspective though, I try to look at events as a set of waves (maybe ’cause I’m in Cali). Your first ‘wave’ could be some teaser tweets that are mysterious. The second wave can be more teasers with more revealing content. Then you got the biggest wave of the set (official news/announcement breaks). It doesn’t stop there though. Surfers don’t just stop after the biggest wave of the set passes by. There are still smaller rideable waves to follow and the peeps in the water aren’t stop riding them until the set is done. Treat your Twitter execution in a similar fashion and plot it on your calendar.  One week of teaser tweets, tweet the launch, 2 weeks of follow on tweets and retweets of any partner/media coverage (third party blog posts, press, etc.).

When you have multiple events going on at once, plotting these on your calendar is key to not only make sure you are on time but to make sure that you aren’t hyping too many things at once, confusing your followers. Don’t make them ‘choose’ from five+ campaigns/contests to be excited about. Keep them focused as much as you can can within your control. Treat/give each event as much exclusive focus as the company roadmap allows to maximized your return.

Conversation

I know you are probably thinking to yourself, “Dude this is Twitter, it’s all about the conversation, What else is there?” While we’ve all kicked the crap out of the dead but still kicking horse that is now ’join the conversation’, I have to respectfully disagree. Twitter is about engagement. Twitter is just one of many mediums to achieve engagment. Engagement is multi-faceted. Engagement isn’t new, it’s older than you. Engagement is WAY bigger than social media. Engagement is only successful when it is allowed to be adaptable and amorphous for the sake of the relationship with your customers.

The randomness and unpredictability of the nature of human conversation on Twitter begs the question: “How the hell do you schedule the random conversational tweet and put them on a calendar?” The way that you approach getting the conversational tweet into some sort of schedule isn’t so much like the event driven tweet with a hard timeline as much as it is like a quota. Make sure that you participate in at least XX amount of relevant, genuine conversation streams per week. Putting a quota on human conversation is not contrived if it’s relevant and you care. If those two elements exist, then a quota just helps to ensure you are maintaining your investment in other people – which is the key to success.

Also Check Out…..

EmediaVitals: Use a Twitter editorial calendar to help lessen impact of ‘tweet’ duty

Onward.

My First Seattle: A #140tc Recap

Posted by Rich Harris – March 10, 2010

What an amazing experience.

Yesterday I returned from Seattle, WA. I had only been to this city’s airport a couple times but I had never had an opportunity to hang out, meet some people, shoot some photos and eat 800 pounds of salmon. Well I did get to do that but that’s not why I was there.

I was there to attend the 140 Twitter Conference put on by @TweetHouse and the Parnassus Group. Jennifer Leggio (@mediaphyter) introduced me to Jason Preston (@jasonp107), the man running the show. Jason was gracious enough to give me the opportunity to be involved and share a panel with some super smart and seasoned tweeps that anyone can learn from and should absolutely follow – Jesse Engle @engle (CoTweet), Shauna Causey @shaunacausey (Comcast), H.B. Siegel @twhb (IMDb.com), and Brad Nelson @bradnelson (Starbucks).

I won’t go into a boatload of detail about everything in this post but thought I’d mention some takeaways and things that I had learned that I thought were either useful, funny, or both.

New Things I Learned

During the Media Panel session we were given some great things to ponder and think about when it comes to doing media and news coverage using Twitter. I had never really thought about what the effect of Twitter would be on broadcasting and doing the news. In a world where people use Twitter to not necessarily double check their emotions before posting, Linda Thomas (@TheNewsChick) deserves kudos for being anti-spin and ensuring her facts are straight before tweeting. Major news media outlets would be doing the public a huge favor by employing more people like her.

Ayush Agarwal (@yush) did a killer job moderating the Dev/Biz Panel. Brilliant developers like the ones on the this panel have to keep all of us emo marketing people in check by ensuring that data, and the tools used to gather that data, makes sense and help support our business objectives methodically. Sites like Twitter and Facebook would not exist with these brilliant minds.

On the Brand Panel Shauna Causey and Brad Nelson both reminded all of us that when you are dealing with customers that are frustrated with your brand, spouting off on Twitter because of a bad experience they had, always approach them with positivity and a focus on treating them with respect. Treat them like you would want to be treated if you were in their shoes.

One of the most educational moments for me was the opportunity I had to learn about an industry that I’ve never known anything about. Even more intriguing was how these two guys I just met were using social media in an industry that I had no idea would have a use for it. I had the chance at the tweetup hosted at Seattle’s Hotel Andra (@HotelAndra) to learn how the farming industry needed social media. With some tasty local wine in hand, Greg Guenther (@greg_guenther) and I sat down with cattle rancher Jeff Fowle (@JeffFowle) and dairy farmer Ray Prock Jr. (@RayLinDairy). These guys are definitely visionary in their approach to use social media as a channel for educating people on the science and process behind where much of our store bought food comes from, how it’s marketed, what we don’t know as Joe Food Consumer, how it’s bought and sold, and the process for monitoring, maintaining and growing a lot of it – meat and greens alike. Great stuff.

Things That Made Me Laugh

Damon Cortese (@dacort) – “People like to click on shit.” and of course DBI, the Douchebag Index. That will be my next t-shirt purchase.

Dom Sagolla (@dom) – His late night red wine-infused Entourage story.

Johnathon Fitzpatrick (@jjtweets) – For his ability to get all “Mike Singletary” on the HootSuite Owl Mascot at 1:00AM.

….and the Magical Unicorn Story of the Night award goes to David Dennison (@DavidDennison) for his mace story. The first, second and third rule of David’s mace story is: “Don’t talk about David’s mace story.” If I told you, I’d have to….well you know.

Onward.