social media life of pi

I (finally!) saw Life of Pi last night in all its multi-dimensional glory and it occurs to me that the story can offer a few parallels to managers newly trying to steward brands across unfamiliar seas of social media.

1. Facebook = The Tiger
Facebook is still the biggest, baddest social media animal on the planet, 750 million voices strong and a beast that anybody doing social communications must learn how to feed without losing one’s metaphorical arm.

Here's a helpful guide to the care and feeding of Facebook for business. But be warned. The Tiger doesn’t wake up the same animal every day. It goes through constant changes which you have to stay alert to or pretty soon you’ll be dead in the water. The rise of Facebook’s promoted posts is a new way the medium is asserting its territorial dominance. And have you noticed that Facebook has just unceremoniously swiped the hashtag idea from Twitter?

2. Twitter = The Hyena
The number two in social media’s primal hierarchy, 250 million monthly users strong. Like the hyena, it communicates in short bursts. (Tweets are 140 charcters) But the bursts can gather forbmidable force when replicated (retweeted) in number. Here's a guide to best practices.

3. Pinterest = The Orangutan
This site is mother of all social media start-ups, the fastest-growing web service in history. It was launched in 2010 and now has 85.5 million visitors a month. Use is heavily weighted female. They've just grown analytics. Here's tips from a power-user. Taming advice for business users here and here.

4. Tumblr = The Zebra with the broken leg
Tumblr is a micro-blog. A constrained space, but you can do a lot with it. It started out as a photo posting site and has since expanded into video. Here are the founders talking about it and how it's expanded over the last 5 years. A lot of brands have figured out how to make it work for them. More examples here.

5. Instagram = The Cock
There’s been a lot of crowing about Instagram since it was introduced in late 2010. What's more, it just got devoured by the Tiger. Here's some tips for putting it to work for business. 

6. Vine = Meerkats
SXSWi was overrun with enthusiasm for this new mobile app from Twitter. Content is 6 second videos. Brands are already coming up with creative uses. Here's a few more.

social media isn't just for kids anymore

A recent study by the Pew Foundation finds that while Millennials remain the most web-social generation, their elders are (slowly) catching up in networking activity. Social use of the web has quadrupled for 74+ since 2008, up from 4% to 16%. The percentage of adults on the web who watch videos has jumped to 66%. The group who most likes to rate things online is the "Silent Generation", ages 65-73. Perhaps they're most comfortable with hierarchy?

This ought to get the attention of pharmas and their agencies: searching for health info is now the third most popular online activity not just for older web surfers, but for all internet users 18 and up.

Read full report here.




tip o the hat to Ben Kunz

media went social 47 years ago today

On November 22, 1963 there were no cellphones, no Twitter, no Facebook, yet within hours the whole country knew that the president had been shot. If you're a Boomer, you'll never forget where you were when you heard. I learned it from my arithmetic teacher, a nun. I'd never seen a nun cry before. Schools closed early. Office workers streamed home. The next day was declared a national day of mourning. The country stayed riveted to screens and because there was only three channels, we all took in pretty much the same thing. Almost as shocking as the event itself was the fact that Walter Cronkite broke down while reporting it. (around 5:25 in the tape.) Two days later, we were traumatized en masse again when Lee Harvey Oswald was himself shot dead on live television.

an appeal to make the shorty awards, well, shorter

As my friends, family and followers on twitter are relieved to know, Shorty Award voting ended yesterday. I'm tickled that @BettyDraper finished in what appears to be 2nd place in the Innovation category, though rankings won't be announced until an awards ceremony on March 3.

So now that I've dusted myself off from the campaign trail, and had a chance to gain a little perspective, I'm thinking that if the Shorty Awards really mean to "Honor the Best Producers of Short Real-Time Content on Twitter" they ought to rethink the open voting.

Last year, Shorty winners were determined only by popular vote which meant that awards went to those with the most time and energy to devote to aggregating votes. At least one finalist, @SavvyAuntie, dropped out of the running for this reason. (Technically, she didn't drop out, but stopped asking for votes, which in a runoff determined by popular vote, is the same thing.) "It's not a fair awards ranking program. It's a popularity contest."

Anyone with a twitter account can be nominated (or nominate themselves) for a Shorty Award. The rules encourage nominees to "campaign and encourage their friends to vote for them." This is a great way to ensure that Shorty Awards is a top trending topic on twitter, but a lousy thing to do to the twitter community which is besieged for weeks with solicitations for votes from anyone with a hope of actually winning.

To their credit, Shorty Awards organizers are attempting to make the awards less about vote-getting this year and more about content creation by instituting another round in the process, a review by the Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences. The name may be amusing, but the membership is impressive, including MC Hammer, David Pogue (NYTimes), Kurt Andersen (NPR), Frank Moss, (MIT media lab), Caterina Fake (co-founder of Flickr) and Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist.) According to the Shorty website, the Academy "will carefully review the finalists' tweets and fill out an anonymous survey with their choices for winners." What role their vote will play in determination of winners isn't clear, but their role is promised to be "vital."

Perhaps next year, the Academy could play an even more vital role, helping to nominate finalists. Should the Shorty evolve to be like other award shows that rely only on recognized experts in a field to identify excellence of others in it? (Imagine if the real Oscars were determined by how many votes actors could wheedle out of viewing audiences?) This being social media, I think the Shorty Awards needs to retain a social component in determination of winners. But couldn't the voting period be contracted? A month is a century in twitter time, interminable to contenders who must keep stumping for votes, excruciatingly long for the twitter community forced to endure so many appeals. Wouldn't an open voting period of a week or less be a relief to everyone?

Of course, despite my beef with an imperfect process, I'll be breathless as other finalists in Times Square on March 3, awaiting word of the winners, grateful there’s any recognition at all for an art still dismissed by so many as "frittering."

social media turns anti-social for Advertising Week

Last week while New York resounded with fervent proclamations from ad agencies saying they are "going digital" (Grey's president: We're bringing in kids with mohawks and tattoos!) more than 200 social media practitioners gathered on the opposite coast for Adweek’s Social Media Strategies Conference in San Francisco. Michael Bissell and I were honored to be among presenters from Razorfish, Mattel, Facebook, Gap, Ogilvy, DDB and others on the forefront of new media. Keynoter MC Hammer (who tweets to show he's "not just parachute pants") proved surprisingly articulate and insightful on the subject.

Give me anyone in this audience and $15 million and I promise you I can make 'em hot. That's easy. But social media is disrupting this model--creating brands + buzz with little investment...Social media is to Hollywood what Napster was to music.

Other retweets throughout the day:

Trying to retract something from the internet is like attempting to remove pee from a pool. (Rohit Bhargava, Ogilvy)

The first social media manual was written in the 30s. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. (Brian Morrissey, Adweek)

You can't optimize traffic until you optimize content! (Paul Beck, Ogilvy)

Dunkin Dave from Dunkin Donuts is an actual person. Who knew? (MC Hammer)

Barbie's Ken is going to be 50 in 2011! [say it ain't so!] Cynthia Neiman, Mattel

If Facebook was a country, it would be the fourth largest in the world: 1. China, 2. India, 3. US, 4. Facebook. (Ian Schafer, Deep Focus)

from Ian Schafer's keynote presentation. Which can be seen in its excellent entirety here.

notes from twitter boot camp

Had the pleasure yesterday of speaking at Twitter Boot Camp, a crash course in Twitter for execs who don't have time to learn it the hard way. (Surprising how much there is to absorb about using a medium limited to a mere 140 characters.)

Representatives from companies doing it right offered tips and best practices to a crowd of a few hundred newbies who'd shelled out $399 (or convinced their travel depts to do so) and come from far away as Rejivak, Iceland.

Tim O'Reilly, who hosted the event, coined a phrase for disorder afflicting many of us with multiple accounts and followers: "stream fatigue." (No OTC remedies available yet.)

Corporate approaches to dealing with twitter reflected various company cultures. David Puner said Dunkin Donuts issues a social media guidelines policy for franchisees, designed to maintain cohesiveness of brand in digital space. As might be expected, Zappos' approach is more freewheeling. According to Tony Hsieh, its CEO, corporate social media policy consists of a single statement: Just be real and use your best judgement. (His standard interview question for prospective employees: Whether they feel lucky or not.) He added that Zappos twitter accounts are considered property of employees who are free to take them, should they leave the company. It's their lives, he shrugged when I expressed amazement at this hands-off approach later at an after-party his company sponsored at the Hudson Hotel. Clearly my old-school expectations needed loosening up. "Here," he said, kindly handing me another free-drink ticket.

Eric Peterson, creator of analytics machine Twitalyzer, used his metrics expertise to burst the bubble being floated by blue-sky marketers touting Dell's report last week of $3 million generated by Twitter. He pointed out that this number amounts to a mere .005 of the company's annual revenue. (Still. In this market, who's to sniff at an uptick of $3 million?)

Ted Murphy made a surprisingly persuasive case for his service Izea which is stirring up controversy among twitterati by introducing pay-per-post to twitter. (His premise: it ain't nothin new.)

I began my advice by pointing out the Four Stages of Twitter, as recently diagnosed by Jason Hiner.

Other tweet-sized insights:

The perfect corporate tweet is a trinity containing: 1. content of interest to the target, 2. a link 3. a call for a response (Marla Erwin, Whole Foods)

Marketers shouldn't overlook the most valuable thing about twitter (and other Social media): it's a 24/7 focus group (Reggie Bradford, Virtrue)

Don't forget your 8th grade grammar. Use abbreviations and lingo sparingly, as many in your target may not understand.  (Carri Bugbee, Big Deal PR)

To pump your company brand on twitter, seek out people who can become corporate all stars. Who best to do this may surprise you. Social media expertise doesn't respect traditional hierarchies. Your best spokesperson may not be your CEO, it could be your janitor. (Steve Rubel, Edelman Digital)

Off to put on my Betty Draper persona to speak at the Twitter Conference today.

and for those who still can't find time to twitter

Now there's Flutter. Limited to 26 characters. Imports Twitter and FB posts, editing them to fit. "Sucking last of latte before facing client in meeting" becomes "Sucking client in meeting." Full GPS capabilites auto-announces wherever you are. As in helpfully informative: "In the bathroom."

Of course, it's a (really well done & worth watching) spoof. But it does bring up a serious question being bantered about among many social media-minded. What's the next big thing? Is there life after twitter?


via Huffington Post via new! improved! Slate