UberNoggin

Back in fourth grade I had a huge crush on a blond boy named Joshua. I didn’t really know him but he looked cool and he made jokes in the hallway. You know how love goes when you’re nine years old. Anyhow, I really wanted Josh to be my boyfriend (whatever that meant) but he didn’t seem to notice me. He did, however, notice my friend Jennifer who was bubbly, cute, funny, and had a much better plastic charm belt than I did. So I came up with a brilliant plan. I’d have Jennifer ask Josh if he’d go roller skating with me on Saturday. I’m sure you can imagine what happened next. There I stood biting my nails as Jennifer walked up to him, then they both turned and looked at me. He smirked, whispered to her, and well, they wound up going rollerskating without me on Saturday. My plan was flawed from the beginning. I can see that now. But back then it seemed brilliant. Jennifer was better with boys so why not allow each of us to play our strengths? The bottom line was that Jennifer wasn’t good at being me.

This morning I found this company. Cherp claims to be able to help companies develop strategies to better use Twitter for marketing and corporate communication. It’s not a bad idea. Social media moves so fast that most big organizations simply can’t keep up with all of it. It makes sense to have a partner who understands the media as well as you understand your business. It’s similar to hiring a cultural expert who can be sure that your company’s message gets translated correctly for a foreign country’s culture. An expert who coaches you before a meeting to be sure you understand social mores and traditions.

But they don’t pretend to be you in the meeting. You can’t hire a company to pretend to be you at the social media party.

I’m sure Cherp wouldn’t advocate it either, but hiring someone else to Twitter/blog/podcast for you is as bad as me asking Jennifer to ask Josh to go out with me. I would have been much better off if I’d asked her to help me work up the courage to talk to him myself. You just can’t hire someone to be you. But you can hire someone to help you speak the language, fit into the culture.

Oh, and Josh? Well, he turned out to be quite the loser by sixth grade anyhow. Ah well.

Like many social media geeks, I’ve had many opportunities to help folks understand how and why social media can change the way they do business, relate to other professionals, etc. These four objections are the most typical responses I hear from my most hesitant audiences. Whether you’re a company, university, or just an individual trying to establish yourself as a brand, the advice below ought to be helpful.

1. “We’re not a tech company. Why would we use that stuff?”

Not long ago, the internet was the land of geeks and nerds but that’s simply not true anymore. Back then, of course, web communications would have only been useful if you were a geek who wanted to get in touch with other geeks but with the preponderance of broadband, inexpensive computers, and mobile devices social media become easy to use and thus your audience, just about any audience in fact, is out there and tuned in to some kind of social media. It could be your employees, business contacts, or potential customers…your audience is there.

2. “We don’t have the time (people, resources) to pay attention to all that stuff.”

You don’t have the time/people/resources NOT to pay attention to the new conversations that are happening about/around/because of you. We can’t begin to calculate the money lost due to bad PR. One negative news story or one unsatisfied customer is all it takes to do damage to your brand and reputation. A bonafide effort to be transparent and conversational can allow us to all be more genuine, more trusted, and more likely to get the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong.

3. “We’re worried that if we start a conversation that people will say bad things about us.”

If you’re afraid that people may have something negative to say about your product/service then you have other issues to attend to beyond social media. If you provide quality customer service or engaging interaction then you’ve got nothing to worry about. If you don’t, well then hearing what you could be doing better could help you improve. Even if the complaints aren’t accurate they can still do damage so it’s best to listen up, pay attention, and address them with open communication.

4. “We already have a web site. That’s enough.”

Websites typically function as electronic brochures. They’re one-way communication. An old-style website talks at the reader rather than engaging them in conversation. Social media allows folks to talk back, to engage in conversation, and to get to know you better.

What hesistations regarding social media have you heard? Perhaps you have your own issues with blogs, Twitter, and other forms of social media. Leave it in the comments! Let’s chat!

“Technologies don’t become socially interesting until they become technologicaly boring.” – Clay Shirkey

If you’re a Twitter user you’ll know what I’m talking about when I ask “Who are you on Twitter?” Are you an employee of the company you work for, are you a friend of your followers, are you a source of information that functions like a newswire, are you a character in your own memoir being written 140 characters at a time? Maybe you swing back and forth between several persona during the day or on weekends? Have you ever caught yourself about to post something and stopped yourself because while one audience (your friends, for example) might really like what you were about to post your boss might not have? Or maybe you’ve been posting away from a conference and suddenly realized that you’ve bored half your followers to death because they’re not at the event and could care less what you’re blathering on about. Or maybe you’re one of those folks who just doesn’t care and you post what you like when you like. More power to you. The rest of us are trying to juggle a balance of self-expression, self-marketing, and keeping our jobs.

I’d like to say that, as some kind of social media guru, I have an answer to this conundrum but I don’t. What I do have, however, are some more questions about what the problem implies that I think are pretty darn interesting. The socially interesting part is that what Twitter has done is make us realize that at any given moment we’re lots of different people with lots of different voices and audiences but because it’s a pain to try to have several different Twitter accounts, we’ve been forced to lump all of our identities into one channel and that creates conflict.

Sure we could all move over to another microblog that let’s us group our followers together into audiences so we could post work-related stuff to just our work-related followers but I think that’s a cop out. I think that the identity conflict on Twitter says more about who we are than how the technology functions. Really folks, why can’t we all be ourselves? It’s naive, I know. Common sense would tell us not to post anything that we couldn’t just say out loud. You wouldn’t stand up in your cube and just shout “My boss is a jerk! If he asks me to stay late one more time I’m going to snatch his fake hair and shove it down his throat” (is that 140 characters or less?)  so why would you post it to Twitter? Well, in some sense, Twitter is like that third-place. If your boss isn’t on Twitter it can function as a little back channel vent through out the day that keeps you from flinging the gum-popping intern in the next cube out the window. But this use implies that you don’t identify what you do or where you work and if your boss finds out about Twitter…well you’re done for. And God forbid someone get API-excited in your office and start aggregating all the in-house Twitter post onto some page that everyone can see! Yikes! That’s worse than trying to explain the huge stack of Post-its in your purse that should be in the supply cabinet.

So what’s the solution? Do we split our identities along application lines? Do we just let it all hang out and thumb our nose at the establishment who might not like what we have to say? Do we become an establishment who allows people to be who they are and benefits from their uncensored feedback?

What do you think?

Are you like me? I’m totaly jealous of folks who seem to have, not just the time, but the ideas to blog every day or even more often. And not only do they post all the time but everything they say is brilliant, well-developed, and thought provoking? Yeah, I secretly hate those people too.

Lately I’ve been asking prolific folks I know how they manage to do what they do. Of course, what’s imperative is that you enjoy writing and write for yourself first, but it’s also nice to think that someone else might actually care what you put down. Here’s a list of strategies I’ve heard lately…what’s yours?

• Carry around a notebook and write down observations that might feed posts later
• Set up a Google alert for terms you’re interested in and scour them for inspiration when you’re stuck
• Write a response to a blog entry written by someone you respect
• Skim over your RSS feeds for trends that seem to be relevant

How do you generate ideas? How do you motivate yourself to write regularly?

The Media Sauce crew held a great event today to share what we know about User Generated Content (UGC) so I got to put together a fun talk about where UGC comes from, why it works, and how to leverage prosumer contet to best benefit your company, organization, campus etc.

Be sure to check out slides seven through ten where I describe the three dominant models of UGC:

1. the funnel: a larger organization requests/motivated users to contribute content that is never released to the public. contests, suggestion boxes etc.

2. the hourglass: the masses are invited to contribute content which is then moderated, evaluated etc and released back to the public. America’s funniest home videos, letters to the editor etc.

3. the swarm: content created by the masses for the masses without moderation, usually through a service such as a website. Youtube, peer to peer file sharing etc.

They’re pretty useful frameworks for thinking about the kinds of UGC that might benefit your efforts.

It’s easy. Just Google “Yourname + Needs” and copy out the first ten instances of the phrase. Oh boy! Mine are a little depressing.

1. Sarah Needs A Cold Shower, Self-Esteem
2. what Sarah needs is a date, maybe some fun, and if it works out a bit of schtupping.
3. Sarah needs to set up her experiment by finding subjects
4. Sarah needs a Wii
5. Sarah needs to get her life back
6. sarah needs some love
7. Sarah Needs Batteries
8. SARAH NEEDS YOUR HELP PLEASE!!!
9. Sarah Needs Your Manly Vote
10. Sarah needs to be hooked up to a respirator in order to survive

Thanks to my mom for this fun little game.

Months ago, when I heard Clay Shirky claim that “Technology doesn’t become socially interesting until it becomes technologically boring” I found myself saying “Amen” back to the television. Due to recent events, I’m not so sure if I still agree.

As is usual, technology gets me into trouble, interesting trouble but trouble nonetheless. A few days ago, sitting in Logan Airport while waiting for my flight home from Campus Technology I opened a new app I’d recently installed on my iPhone: Whoshere by myRete. This is how it works. Whoshere scans the network within a given range (you set how far out you want it to scan) and displays little profiles for the other folks who also have Whoshere installed on their iPhone. Click on a profile and start chatting away. Pretty simple. Pretty straightforward. Maybe I’m naive but I thought it would be fun to be able to kill a bit of time chatting with other folks with geeky tendencies. Not so much.

Because I forgot to sign off of the application, before I even opened it I was receiving incoming chats. Lots of chats actually. About 25 to be exact. Twenty five folks in less than 1000 meters who not only had an iPhone but had this app and had it open and running. Pretty cool, right? I thought so until I started scanning down the list of incoming messages. Every single one was from a man. Not a single woman on the list of nearby folks. And every one of them was a pick-up line. Now I might have made myself a bit of a target by using a username with “girl” as part of it but it’s not as if I had some bikini-clad icon for my account. It’s just my logo.

Did these guys seriously think they were going to “hook up” in the frantic fifteen minute layover they were on? I thought surely not but then I asked a few men I know what they thought. What I heard surprised me. Think of the beginnings of the internet, they told me, what was it really for? Porn. Once the lab geeks were done using it to pass messages back and forth between facilities the next in line to make use of it were the chat room cruisers. Why should this be any different, right? Here I am thinking how cool it would be to chat with folks at conferences and find sympathetic souls in airports when your flight is delayed for hours on end. Silly me.

For once, the socially interesting aspects of the technology not only outweighed the technological interest but practically slapped in the face with its “hey baby, I like your logo” forwardness. I can’t accept any kind of “men are pigs” explanation for this and I don’t feel like I should avoid using the application because, if I do, it will always be a cruising app and so will all the others like it.

So what’s the deal? Anyone else want to try to explain this kind of behavior? The reaction to a new communication channel?