Time and time again I have sat in boardroom upon boardroom listening to people refer to social media as if it were some exciting new buzz word for them to knock around like a tether ball. I smile and nod while letting them believe they are impressing me with their severely misguided knowledge of the social space. Try not to judge, try not to make them feel stupid, but secretly inside I loathe their reasons for wanting to “get social”. It has nothing to do with getting to know their customers, wanting to be a better company, wanting to listen, act or change. And is only to do with money.

I feel sick inside when this happens. And it does happen.

I’ve always believed that social media is inherently the anti-corporation by its very nature. It goes against everything that a corporation stands for really. It’s risky, it’s socially conscious, and it’s fair. The reason why marketers and companies are embracing social media now is because they realize that they will soon need it to survive. It’s a different landscape out there and guess what, nice guys FINISH FIRST not last. So the companies with the best hearts will have the fattest bottom lines.

It’s no longer about the product, the service, the name, reputation, the years in business. My generation and the ones beneath me are tech-savvy, conscientious, intelligent buyers. We want to know everything about the products we consume. We have a conscience about our consumption. I am the best of both worlds. A Gen Xer who remembers life pre-internet, an early adopter of technology, but still cynical about trusting the corporation. I am also a marketer. The perfect storm. I understand both sides of the coin. I share my inherent distrust with my peers, but also fight to earn trust for my clients among my peers.

Watching corporations get social is a bit awkward. Almost like watching a group of leather-clad bikers try their hand at ballet. It’s anything but graceful. But it’s happening, and will continue to happen.

We are at the same point now that we were at in the 90s when companies started realizing “oh crap… the interenet is real. I guess we do need a website”.  Most companies recognize the value in word of mouth endorsement. Not all companies belong in the social space yet, but there are so many ways to have a social presence without looking like a biker taking ballet. This will continue to evolve as do our views on marketing and trust.

Soon, like having a website, having a social presence will be the norm for all companies. You will be watched, rated on, reviewed, and have your business out in the open for all to see. If you don’t conduct yourself with integrity and honesty, it won’t fare well for your business. So you can start now, by asking yourself what you can do to be better. How can you connect with your customers? What can you learn from them? How can you raise the bar on value?

If you want to start a social media program, I urge you… make it about something other than your bottom line. A healthy ROI will be a natural byproduct of a successful company who is listening, sharing, and trying to do the right thing. There are dozens of examples out there of this. Just look at Zappos!

Basically what I’m saying here is don’t act like a corporation… Even if you are one.

Humans come first.

Warning: This article may potentially be offensive to Twidiots.

I must say, I am embarrassed to be a marketer sometimes when I see the way some folks are conducting themselves on Twitter. I am embarrassed for all of us, and for the industry as a whole. There are so many marketers doing a BAD job on Twitter, making themselves out to be smarmy used-car salesman types (excuse the gender reference). Then there’s the ones who just don’t get it at all… Flogging each and every blog post or dry corporate announcement, with ZERO effort to connect with others or share anything of any value.

Sorry that was a rant wasn’t it?!

Okay, so rather than another lame article on how to build influence on Twitter. I’d like to run down a few things NOT to do on Twitter, since people seem to have missed that memo.

1. Don’t accept EVERYONE that adds you

If you live in Toronto, do you really want to join a car club in New Jersey? Do you care about a local seniors group in Idaho. No and you shouldn’t, because it is irrelevant to your life and business! Some people will add you that you would never have any need or desire to connect with, so don’t! Just add the people who you think can add value to your life, people who you’d like to learn more about, or gain something from knowing.

2. Ditch the personal sounding auto responses

I know some may argue with me here, but I find it incredibly annoying to receive those friendly “thanks for following – check out my ebook on how to make money on Twitter” auto-responses that “thank” me for following somebody. Many times people try to fool you into believing that it’s not an automatically generated response by saying things like “hey there, interesting tweets, you seem cool… etc etc”. In my opinion, these people need to be kicked in the teeth.

If you use my name, I’ll assume you took the time to write to me personally, and will appreciate you for that. If you didn’t, I’ll assume you’ve sent me a generic mass-distributed auto-response. They are meaningless and are a waste of space. If you have something to say to me personally, about my business, posts, or industry. Get personal and do it on a one-to-one basis.

The point of Twitter is to connect… Not have a robot stand in for you.

3. Stop being a self-promoting narcissistic JERK

You have a great company, an awesome blog, and a plethora of awesome content. Good for you. So does everybody else. It’s okay to promote an exceptional blog post every once in a while, especially if it’s of interest to your group. It’s even okay to post something about yourself or your business daily. But if all you’re doing is standing on your soap box annoyingly shouting out “hey look at me and my business” people are just gonna tune out!

I’m not suggesting you NOT promote your content or business. That would be dumb. I’m just saying, that shouldn’t be ALL you do on Twitter. You will get a bad rap for being an a-hole. And you don’t want that.

Take an interest in others. Post links to great articles. Comment on others articles or content. Share whitepapers. Get silly. Show your personality. Engage in dialogue with others. These are the things that will most enhance your Twitter experience.

4. Don’t obsess over your follower count

If you enjoy being on Twitter and post regular decent content, your follower count will grow organically along with your number of tweets. It’s okay to add people who are of interest to you and to search directories to find people you want to add. But when you are sitting there hour after hour adding as many people as you possibly can so you can impress your clients and friends with how many followers you have. Well, you’re just an idiot aren’t you?!

The content and the quality of your Twitter network is far more important than the actual number of followers you have. Anyone can add thousands of followers. But it’s what you do with your network that counts.

5. You are a Human… Not a billboard.

This is most often seen with people who just don’t “get” Twitter. They spend hours thinking of the perfect tweet to broadcast out to their group of followers, spending far too long thinking about what to say and how to say it. Every tweet they post is dry and robotic with a lack of human quality. The tweets usually relate to their business, service, offering, or some other pat on the back for themselves.

Stop treating your Twitter account like a press release distribution system, an ad or a corporate messaging board. You are a human being and have a personality. Show it! How is anybody supposed to connect with a corporate robot?! Nobody will want to. Loosen up, have some fun. Don’t be afraid to be yourself. If you need a drink to do that, then go ahead have one on me!

So hopefully this article has been both helpful and entertaining. If you were offended by it, then you clearly need to change your Twitter strategy! Sometimes a hearty helping of brutal honesty is just what the doctor ordered.

Have fun out there… and for f*ck’s sake, be real.

It has occurred to me that while I invest a great deal of time into my clients social media activities and in my own social networking, I have really been letting my blog fall by the wayside.

I have been an avid blogger for 5 years now, with various blogs ranging from humour and satire, marketing, professional development, to fiction and poetry. I used to spend a tremendous amount of time updating my blogs. If I hadn’t updated in a week I would consider myself to be an awful slacker.

These days with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, FlickR, and the plethora of other social networking sites I am involved in, I find I just don’t have time to update my blog as often.

What I wonder, is do other people find this too? I know there are millions of blogs out there and a huge community of bloggers (which I still consider myself to be a member). Are people updating their blogs less and less these days now that there are so many social sites around? I’d be curious to see the numbers. You’d have to assume that with the majority of the engaged online population turning to social media communities, that blogging would be slowing down some.

Maybe that’s another post.

Twitter was buzzing today with a huge announcement that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. With over 250 Milion users worldwide it is an interesting move on Facebook’s part and will be even more interesting over the next few months as their intentions become clear. It is no secret that a huge portion of FriendFeeds content is driven by Twitter posts, so it could be an attempt on Facebook’s part to get closer to Twitter.

While I use FriendFeed, I really don’t see the value from an engagement perspective. From my standpoint it is basically a “catch all” for my social activities online. I don’t ever log in or comment through FriendFeed. The only time I do is if I need to change or add something. I do see value in having a “catch all” place for people to keep up to date with your social activity, however, I am not sure what Facebook would do to change that, or even if they would want to.

Time will tell what happens, but it is something that I am sure a lot of folks will be watching closely. Hopefully Facebook will clean up their privacy issues and win over the non-trusting demo of anti-Facebookers who enjoyed sites like FriendFeed as an alternative.

Above: Showtime nails it by sending out these super creative weed bouquets to media agencies promoting the premiere of Season 3 of their hit series Weeds. This is the kind of thinking that needs to go into blogger pitches!

Working with bloggers is an area I concentrate on, and one thing I perpetually hear from bloggers is that companies and agencies often put little to no effort into their pitches. This is an area that marketers need to drastically improve upon. Most of the bloggers that are receiving these pitches are getting tons of requests from others, and they understand how valuable their blog coverage is so they’re not just gonna write a review for a company that doesn’t know their name or just fires them a poorly thought out email.

Common Examples:

1. Company X sends a package to a bunch of bloggers with a letter that reads “Dear Blogger” instead of taking the extra time to address them personally. Sure they sent the blogger some swag, but where’s the love?!
2. A mass email goes out to a harvested list of top bloggers, again no personalization… And nothing tangible to see or touch, no press release, no marketing material, just a “hey – would you like to review our product? because it’s awesome”…. Yeah… No it really isn’t. And opening an email that says “Dear First Name” is a major SNAFU.
3. X agency sends a personalized email to a blogger and blows sunshine up their ass with a load of crap about how great their blog is and what a good fit it is for their regional promotion in Toronto… Problem is, blogger is in Iowa. Duh!

So those are just 3 examples of major mistakes that happen all the time. I could rhyme off a dozen others, but the point here is not to point out stupidity, but more to help prevent it.

If you are planning on pitching a blogger, take some advice from a blogger and marketer.

• Take 5-10 minutes to read a few posts on their blog. Where are they from? What is their blog about? You know… Things you should probably know if you are gonna ask them to review your product.

• If you are going to send them an email, send them more than a standard mass email about how great your product is. Tell them WHY your product is a good fit for their blog.

• If you have a product – send it to them! I know this sounds stupid and obvious… But you’d be surprised!

• Don’t stalk them about whether they’ve made a decision, or when the post will be up. Instead include flexible date parameters in your pitch and trust that their post will fall between those dates.

• And finally, the MOST important one of all… Don’t try to influence their review!! Your opinion is BIAS, you think your product is great because you get paid to think that. Let the blogger express their own opinions and views about it. If they say something negative, don’t sweat it. Consider it market intelligence!

Remember bloggers are creative, opinionated, and intelligent people. They appreciate a little bit of thought and originality, and it could mean the difference between them being happy to review your product on their blog and them totally flaming you for your horrible etiquette.

Have fun out there!

I’m very excited to announce that there is FINALLY a Tweet Up outside of Toronto. Yes that’s right. The wonderful folks at Twest of To are hosting Burlington’s first ever Tweet Up! The event is scheduled for Thursday May 7th at the Queens Head Pub downtown Burlington from 7pm – 11pm. They have managed to secure some great sponsors and will have plenty of surprises and giveaways in store! Better yet, Twest of TO has joined forces with 12for12K and all proceeds from the event go to the Hospice of Peel to support families battling with life-threating or terminal diseases.

So if you’re a blogger, twithead, facebooker, blipper, tech nerd, net geek, designer or social media evangelist… Get your booty on out to the first ever burlington Tweet Up! If you’re gonna tweet about it, don’t forget to use the #twestofTO hashtag!

Here’s the official invite:http://www.twestofto.org/

See You There!

@selinajane

Okay, so I am addicted to TED Talks… And I came across this one that talks about a website/app called We Feel Fine. The site is an almost real time collective of human feelings that are collected from a number of blogs and displayed in a variety of ways. The engine scours the web every ten minutes and looks for the phrase “I feel” or “I am feeling” in the content, then saves the full sentence in the database. Each feeling is colour coded and referenced against a pre-existing list. If an image is found in the post, the image is also saved into the database.

You can navigate by image; clicking the image to discover the associated emotion attributed to that image, or by clicking little coloured microbe looking dots, that each reflect a thought or feeling. The amazing thing about this is that you can actually navigate through to these people’s blogs and connect with them.

I am so inspired by this. It has been a while since I have seen a website that impresses me as much as this one has. If you have a few minutes, seriously… Check it out. It is totally worth it.

Here are some interesting stats taken from their sit:

11,482,671 = TOTAL FEELINGS COLLECTED

2,122,893 = TOTAL UNIQUE PEOPLE

08.26.2005 = FIRST FEELING COLLECTED

Congratulations to Facebook for reaching an amazing milestone of 150 million active users around the world! I learned (reading their blog post) that Facebook is available in more than 35 languages and 170 countries and territories.

Since their interface changed (and despite the protest from the change-resistent folks) the platform has become a lot better. I have personally noticed that I am not being as inundated with application requests and other silly little games and chatchke that I’m not really that interested in. It begs the question though, have application developers felt the burn since they changed their platform? Have people become less-engaged in the apps & has the novelty worn off?I’d be interesting in hearing from developers about whether they’ve noticed a change at all since the switch. My guess would be yes, but that is based on my own engagement. Now that my apps are in a neat little box out of the way of my profile, I often forget about them. I can’t remember the last time I sent a piece of flair or drew some graffiti.

The profiles were starting to look a bit MySpacey and tacky before they changed to the new layout, so I commend Facebook for noticing this and making the change quickly to avoid looking as awful as MySpace and keeping the content organized!

I was over at Radical Trust and noticed that Collin is hosting a 5 Gems Meme for Social Media to expose campaigns that deserve a bit more attention, are worthy of sharing, or are just so clever that they have to be shared. The idea was spawned from this post by Peter Kim, which is a crowdsourced list of social media marketing examples. I followed Collin’s link and was absolutely floored when I saw this massive list. It represents such wonderful diversity in Social Media and is a great tool for any nay sayer that says Social Media isn’t for everyone!

Seth Godin, my favourite marketing guru and agent of change states that in order for advertising to work and be successful in today’s market, it must be remarkable. And by that he means, that it must be both amazing and initiate “remarks”, thus creating dialogue.

This is the one thing that I constantly struggle with. So often, clients are afraid to take a risk, afraid to try something different out of fear of failure. They may be worried about stocks and share holders, they may be worried about taking on something new and experimental before it’s been tested to death (by which time it will probably be dead) and they just don’t want to try.

Well… isn’t doing something “average” failure in itself? Isn’t doing something the same way you’ve always done it, in a sense a failure? A failure to innovate, a failure to change, and a failure to create really great content that is mandatory for survival on the social web.

Doing something “good” is not okay. Doing something the same way you did it last year, because it seemed to go well, is not okay. Where’s the innovation in that? The market is different than it was last year.

Social Media has changed the way we view and perceive advertising. The whole approach has changed, and yes, even in a year! There are companies out there who are not afraid to change, who are not afraid to innovate and who are taking risks in Social Media that other companies are simply too slow or too fearful of taking. These are the companies that will succeed.

The one thing you can count on is change, so why resist it?!