OMFG!!!! THEY SWORE ON THE TWITTER!

So in response to the Chrysler Tweet from hell where one of their agency partners knocked the city of Detroit for its drivers, the same tired argument gets thrown out about who *owns* social media. (The brand, its PR agency, a stand-alone digi-social shop, etc.)

Wrong question.

“People Beside Themselves As Brand Has Human Moment on Twitter.”

Another example of brand honesty. Sorta. So the Red Cross got *caught* being real on Twitter with an update not meant for public consumption. They subsequently followed it up with an apology and deletion of the original with extreme prejudice. Result: social Media order of the universe restored, yea! On one hand, you have to respect any brand that remains consistent in its messaging wherever it appears.

But you don’t always come here for the *other* hand.

Help wanted.

“100,000 Facebook Fans”

Oh, I’ll get you 100,000 fans, but it’s gonna cost you a lot more than $500, friendo.

(Via.)

Interactive Producer, or writer on steroids?

I report, you deride. Part of the ongoing fun of social media is seeing the ways that employers describe job opportunities. Check this one out from Mashable. I’d say it sure redefines what I *thought* an interactive producer does. (Full ad after the jump.) Anyone taking this gig might need to stock up on Red Bull first though because the $27K salary being offered won’t even leave you enough for water. I know salary tends to be a reflection of whatever part of the country you’re in, but really, for the volume of content they want? To give you an idea of what places are trying to get away with these days, one of the things they require is 200 blog posts a month, 300-500 words each. (That’s seven posts a day.) Compared to the garden variety media publication which pays about $50 per post on average, and they’re already over their budget. But hey, in times like these, someone will be desperate enough to let themselves be taken advantage of and probably apply.

Interactive Producer Job Description

This summer I hear the tweeting...

What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground.

Keep taping, right “citizen journalists?” Not sure if this a rant against Twitter or the way people use social networks to further an agenda. Hmmm. Okay, latter! The catalyst for it was the recent presidential election in Iran and an attempt I saw to equate slain protestor Neda with “The Movement™ (as I’m now calling it).

A few might question the authenticity of the clip, but it’s more than that. The bigger irony here is equating The Movement™ with the iconic look of a president who instead wants to stay out of the election process in Iran.

What are we doing here, really.

Apparently Twitter now does everything from breaking news to washing your dog to exploiting tragic events for the good of... (say it with me) The Movement.™ This is achieved by goading you into swapping out an avatar “for real change you can believe in.”

Look, I’m not against lending voice or speaking for those whose government won’t allow it, but at the risk of pinning the metaphor meter, the constant attempts to recreate the next Tiananmen Square as this generation’s Vietnam are getting old. If Gen Whine were to have a t-shirt as non-descript as their causes, it would simply be I Was There.*

Wherever “there” is that week of course.

(That claim noticeably belonging to anyone who’d served in Vietnam, the idea being that unless you participated in said event, how could you possibly understand what they went through. That vibe having since been co-opted for any number of causes.)

Maybe that’s what things like green avatars do in this age: Let you wave freedom flags from behind the safety of a 15” screen. You’re there–in spirit.

Most people forget or seem to ignore two things however.

First, regimes who do unspeakable things to their citizens learned long ago to ignore outside influences. Think Kim Jong Il gives a shit about the UN, let alone Twitter? Let the person who can make more of a difference be aware.

Direct those tweets at president Obama kids. His lips may say no but his polling numbers say maybe. Besides, you’d have a better shot with him than trying to convince Iranian hardliners with anything but overwhelming force. Good luck with a few rocks.

Secondly, people are watching this Faces of Death clip out of a morbid sense of curiosity as much as having genuine political motivations. With every click viewers inadvertently help create Martyr 2.0. No, no, really, you should feel proud, not disgusted!

Thing is, the truly iconic moments we remember seeing surrounding a violent event almost always tend to depict the moment after, not during. What has more power? I’m voting less is more. Contrast a moment you don’t usually see with the one that makes headlines, like images of the real Tiananmen Square.

A student stopping a tank is a far more romantic notion than a pile of bodies, innit. What if the tank hit him though. Does the moment lose its effect? Does it become less important? Does seeing one student stand there diminish the impact of knowing how many others died? Are we that hard up for iconic moments now that we take whatever we can get our hands and cell phones on?

(To be clear, I’m talking about showing someone’s last moments and subsequent death.** That’s something you don’t need to see to impart some deeper meaning on the events of the day, as if that one incident will be the PR flashpoint the protests needed.)

Unfortunately, this is the downside of social networks as unfiltered B-roll. Something traditional journalism and newspapers can still claim the higher ground over: Knowing when and what to edit.

The iconic image up top is Mary Ann Vecchio after seeing the body of a dead student. It wasn’t until later after the event that CSN&Y allowed Kent State to live on forever in song. The Iranian elections? They have Twitter and YouTube.

At least until next week when Darfur starts acting up again and everything else takes a back seat.

*Comes in all sizes; never goes out of style either because there’s always another cause around the corner to wear or regift for that special protester in your life.

**Yes, 9/11 imagery shown ad nauseum already considered. Next.

Tags: Iran elections, Neda

Monetizing social media.

Wish I had a sexier title for you and more fitting visual, but alas, nope.

There’s one phrase I hear way too much lately among more than a few media, agency and PR types: “How do we monetize social media?” Doesn’t matter what it is either. Widgets, apps or sites where you share little parts of your life—with 12 million others. (I offer a simple solution for another way to approach this a little later.)

Yes, brands and agencies are supposed to make money, that’s why we all do this selling thing we do. But that’s not important to the masses who use Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and every other person sharing stuff or hanging out with their friends online.

They don’t see one dime of revenue—why should they care about whether it makes money or not? They’re at those places to connect with friends, not your brand—something Toad talks about often. I bring up the monetizing part because it feels like there’s just too much focus on it, yet almost nobody mentions the obsession with it.

I’d rather define what success is for social media sites just a little more clearly.

Typically, the first thing you hear from brands or new media evangelists when a site doesn’t make money: it’s a failure. From the POV of the people running the site, maybe. You can look at YouTube before they got bought to see how this was almost the case. (As I recall, their traffic generated almost a million dollar per month server bill, yet they had no real way to pay for it and faced being shut down.)

But as far as the users of the site were concerned, it was a success.

Same with MySpace and Facebook. You couldn’t tell those users that the collective millions of views their videos got were a failure. They defined themselves, (and still do), by how popular they were online. For some, it was profile or page views. Still others, it was about the friends they added or how many ‘important’ friends added them. For Gen i/Text, this equals popularity and acceptance:

I’m more popular, maybe even better than you because my MySpace or YouTube page has more subscribers, friends or views.

Which means then one brand’s failure is another user’s success. If that’s the case, why not chill when it comes to immediately focusing on profitability. Make the experience, whatever it is, cool. Make it practical. Make it work.

That last one is as important as any other factor. Why does it seem a new Facebook app or social media site is released literally every hour claiming to do what the one it appears it was cloned from couldn’t?

What about spending more time getting it ‘more’ right than rushing to get it out there. It’s as if the attitude “Let’s just get it live and fix it later” is so engrained that nobody stops to question the insanity.

(On a side note, here’s a recent look at popular Facebook apps that do work, here and here. For some that didn’t, go here. And, for an even more in-depth look at the what, how and why things work the way they do on Facebook, read this developer’s approach to designing apps. Want even more stat porn showing popularity? Here ya go.)

Okay, nuff about specific sites or apps though because I’m not here to plug Facebook. This is about making a user experience people want to be a part of no matter which way they encounter a brand. For example, assuming I never saw an Apple commercial before, I would know as soon as I step foot in one of their retail stores, it’s a very cool place to be. Likewise, I may never go into a brick and mortar version of Zappos.com, but their online ordering/return process was/is hassle-free.

The Devil’s Advocate response: “Well, why not build in monetization up front? Why is that so wrong? It’s just business.” Maybe—if it can be done. Somehow though the cool part always seems to take a back seat when it’s just about profits.

So what’s my ‘brilliant’ idea after all that to ‘monetize’ this stuff? Simple. Change the way you view it: use social media to monitor what people are saying about your brand. In other words,

Listen.

How? By Googling “I hate” + “your brand” to see what people really think—not just what the agency tells you from skewed focus groups. (And, Google’s free of charge too!) Then, if you’re really committed to improve your product or service, address the issues you hear.

Know what? You’ll likely see less abandonment of your shopping carts because you improved your online checkout—after you read a complaint on a blog.

You’ll add free wifi to your stores not because it’s what most coffee shops both big and small have already done, but because half the people online were asking for it.

You may already preach to the choir of brand evangelists, influencers and advocates, fine. But don’t forget to go after the weakest link: the annoyed customers. You’ll likely gain more converts among that group because you improved customer service after they bitched about a truly bad experience.

You’ll stop worrying so much about how to make money with the latest social media whatever and fix the ‘gadget’ you already have in front of you—your brand’s product or service.

Monetization will naturally follow, no?

Tags: social media

Download this.

If you have a chance, don’t miss the weekly series Download: The True Story of the Internet on Discovery Channel, covering the names and faces of people behind the internet, as reported by John Heilemann. (The series repeats through April with times and dates here.) Bubble was the episode I caught which showed the origins of eBay and Amazon—and just how much these guys didn’t know leading up to the crash. It’s worth noting that we’re almost a decade later and from the cheap seats here, it looks like we could be headed for a similar bubble with social media sites like MySpace and Facebook. (The other thing worth noting is the irony of a show called Download that you, um, can’t?) Nits aside, catch it.

Tags: Download: The True Story of the Internet, social media