It’s entirely possible that this post is filled with envy and narcissism. But I don’t think so.

This topic has been brewing in my mind for some time, and yesterday, I arrived at a point at which my thoughts crystallized and I could make sense out of what I was thinking.

My point: I hate social media bullshit artists. As a practitioner, it is getting harder to teach internal and external clients the skills to distinguish what is helpful, concrete advice and what is self-serving of shallow counsel. This frustrates me enormously because some high-profile names pollute and dominate the space with pontifications and advice that I feel is at times, self-serving and at others, a firm grasp of the obvious. This makes it SO much harder to have solid advice sink in when a client’s response might be “Well, [person here] has written four books and was the keynote at BlogWorld Expo. Why should I listen to you?”

I’ll tell you why: because I am not a bullshit artist.

Could I have envy that so-called “A-Listers” write books, get huge speaking fees and make a bazillion dollars a year? Sure. But again, I’m content with my place in the world of social media advice but am frustrated that some big names make it harder for the rest of us who try to offer actionable advice. Recently, I was horrified to read a blog post in which an A-Lister posted his normal speaking fees, and the cost of one speech – ONE SPEECH – could easily outstrip the annual salary of a junior social media worker bee in a smaller market.

I have to offer a caveat, and it is a big one: I am writing a book so point the finger at me with many of the same criticisms that I will level here. Here’s the difference, though: I am not trying to sell more books (it’s not even out yet), but an important part of the book is to attempt to help up-and-coming social media practitioners distinguish between those who are smart and they can learn from, and those who I think are phoneys and bullshit artists.

The best advice that I can give here is a combination of my own ruminations, those of my colleagues and friends in a Facebook group (you know who you are) and specifically what my friend and author of “The Like Economy,” Brian Carter pointed out. When starting out or hiring someone to help formulate a social media strategy would be to ask them:

• In the recent past, what accomplishments can you point to that you have achieved for others? The unspoken point here is, aside from writing books, counting your Twitter followers and crowing about your speaking engagements, what have you actually done that has helped others achieve their social media communications objectives? And how have you measured the success?
• What types of clients have you served? Again, many offer case studies about helping Fortune 500 companies (or at least speaking at their events), but the majority of companies in this country are small or medium-sized enterprises. Is the strategic advice that you give applicable to all companies, and does the difference lay in the tactics? Most companies don’t have multi-million dollar budgets to throw at social media. When I was teaching, the fixation of texts and Harvard Business Review articles to focus on Fortune 500 companies missed a critical point: most people will NOT end up working there. They will end up at much smaller organizations and need advice on how to make it work there.
• Finally, is there as much listening as there is pontificating? I spent nearly 15 years in the agency world, and through practice (and mistakes), I learned to listen to clients and tease out what is was that they were attempting to accomplish through the use of social media. Start with the client’s communications objectives. Some more recognized names go on about the latest, shiny tool, but one size does not fit all. Nor does one strategy or one tactic. And tenting ones fingers and saying “engagement” over and over again serves only to pollute the space in which many of us operate. It makes it harder: damn harder.

So yeah, I’m writing a book and have pimped it here. I am at best, a B-minus Lister, but in my career (or for most of it) I have tried to be a good listener, stay on top of what is new and interesting in social media and offer practical, actionable advice to clients. Not sell books. Not trying to build my “personal brand.” Not increase my Klout score. And certainly not crow about what I charge for people to come listen to me.

Am I envious? Not really.

I’m disgusted.

Mark

Image:  Shark Bait Shirts.

©2012 intersection of online and offline. All Rights Reserved.

Disclaimer:  This past week, I was a guest at Disney and had the pleasure of speaking with many of their social media, marketing and communications professionals.  That visit is the nexus of this blog post.  I have not been compensated in any way to write this post.  So there.

Since it’s early days, there have been rules about blogging.  I grabbed a pretty concise history of blogging from Wikipedia:

The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists, journalists, or journalers. A few called themselves “escribitionists”… Justin Hall, who began eleven years of personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College, is generally recognized as one of the earliest bloggers,as is Jerry Pournelle. Another early blog was Wearable Wireless Webcam, an online shared diary of a person’s personal life combining text, video, and pictures transmitted live from a wearable computer and EyeTap device to a web site in 1994.

So as I write this, “early” blogging was a scant seven years ago and has now grown into more an an estimated 450 million”live” blogs in English alone according to Hattrick Associates.  This does not include “zombie” or “sleeping” blogs on which you wrote a rant about your ex-girlfriend, forgot about it, never wrote again and forgot to tell the fine folks at Blogger.  Until you got back together, she found it and she broke up with you all over again.

While blogging began on a personal level, corporations started to figure out that this was, in fact, a viable communications channel.  Cheap, easy and fast.  And if the guys living in their mom’s basements could do it, we can do it too, right?

Kinda sorta, but not really.

Traditional corporate communications was and in many ways still is, based upon a top-down, one-to-many model.  Company A makes a pronouncement from the Top of the Mount, and people will gather and eat the communications crumbs tossed down.  While this worked in a press release model, it is a train wreck in the blogging model.

Blogging is about interaction between people.  It’s about honesty, transparency and above all, being social (duh, the term “social media”).  And above all else, it needs to be authentic. Blogs are written in first-person and are designed, in most cases, to begin a conversation among either the author and readers via comments, or if things really go well, among those who are reading and commenting.

Top-Down Communications Model meet Authenticity.  Some successes, some train wrecks.

Let’s start with who does it well:  Disney Parks Blog.  As I mentioned before, I had the chance to meet some of the smart people who write and run this who understand that a blog that is clearly inauthentic, marketing-speak or the zeros and ones equivalent of a QVC commercial at 3:00 in the morning is doomed to failure.  People who read will not only be turned off, they will likely call you out.  More on that later.

What I like about the Disney Parks blog is its authenticity. People are not ghost writing;  it’s people writing.  They are not trying to shove the latest shiny object down your e-throat, they are communicating, with passion that comes through, excitement about things that Disney-philes (and there are LOTS of them) want to read.  Here’s more of what I like:

1. The blog does not attempt to misrepresent what it is or fool you.  It’s fine to sell stuff on a blog, but be honest about it.  If you are writing about flat feet and are Dr. Scholls, people will figure out who you are and what you sell.  Duh.  But don’t give me three steaming paragraphs of marketing bwana disguised as conversation and then point me to your latest product.
2. It is first-person.  The people who write on the blog have pictures, job titles and links to their prior blog posts.  They are real people, not robo-bloggers.
3. Its doesn’t overwhelm you with with sales - it offers information that readers want.  Here’s an entry from November 18 of this year – in its entirety: “Guests visiting Tomorrowland in the 1950s and 1960s would encounter a unique original Disneyland character that symbolized Americans’ interest in space exploration. In this rare photo from the summer of 1960, the Tomorrowland ‘Spaceman’ is apparently joined by ‘Spacewoman.’”  Yep.  That’s IT.  And that one paragraph drew 20 comments.  So clearly someone is listening and interacting.
4. It feeds the Disney Fan Boy Beast.  All the way back in 2009, I wrote a post entitled “I Love Disney. Ok.  There, I Said It.”  I wrote about Disney Cruise Lines and how the really got the use of the Web to provide information as well as generate interest.  And there are many, many Disney Fan Web sites out there with thousands of aficionados who make Apple Macolytes look like disinterested teenagers.  So rather than attempting to create a need, they are filling an existing thirst for information.  Big difference.  I don’t see a place where Maytag dishwasher people convene to exchange the latest settings for the rinse cycle.I don’t consider myself an A-List blogger by any means, but I have been pitched to write about crap that I don’t care about or I have seen gross misuse of social media.   But I am not going to “Like” the Facebook page of a kitchen appliance in my home – because all if want it to do is wash my dishes right.  Way back in 2009, Michael Arrington wrote in Tech Crunch:  ”It’s nice to know that if I’m a facebook loser my virtual mom will call up the other kids and ask if they’ll come play with me. Because that sure worked in the real world when I was 10.”
5. It is clear that the purpose of the blog is to inform. Rinse, lather, repeat.  The people who get it know that the real purpose of a corporate blog is to inform you.  Not sell you.  Not carpet-bomb you will corporate double-speak.  It’s like the equivalent of a TV network (by mere mention of the slogan I will get at least three flames) “We Report.  You Decide.”  As I read the Disney blog, I see it as informing me of stuff that I want to read and want to know – I am the parent of two young children.  They aren’t selling me discounted park passes or encourging me to “tell a friend” about how to buy vintage Minnie Mouse merchandise.

I would go on here, but I think you get the point.   The train tracks of corporate blogging are littered with the corpses of self-inflicted wrecks.  Sony, Wal*Mart and McDonalds.  Mazda.

Disney Parks blog gets it right.  No blog gets everything right one hundred percent of the time (I still don’t understand the “Go Network” and how it is still alive), but this is a darn good blog when you run it past the authenticity check.

And Wal*Mart, McDonalds and Sony?  I hope you are listening.

Mark

Image sources:  Disney Parks blog and AE Ashley Ellis.

©2012 intersection of online and offline. All Rights Reserved.

My take on the kerfuffle with National Rental Car and Chapstick and theory that the blame lay with management resulted in some good, interesting feedback.  Thanks, guys. I postulated that likely, with MAJOR consumer brands, the fault lies in bad decisions made by higher-ups that overrule or ignore the advice of the internal social media evangelist(s).   I can’t imagine that a major brand would pick someone out of his mom’s basement or elevate someone who is completely compliant or clueless about listening and building social media-based dialogue with stakeholders.  I could be wrong, though, because you can’t fix stupid.

So with that out of the way, like many of us who have worked in social media before it was called social media, what do you do when you run into roadblocks and brick walls- mindsets on the part of clients, or harder, internal bosses that either ignore the good advice you have given them, are afraid of it, ignore it, or simply veto it?

There are zero easy answers and perhaps the clearest answer depends upon how much you are invested in your job, your brand or its place in your corporate or client’s communication program.  In short, how hard do you fight, and how?  Having found myself in this situation many, many times, I’ve come up with some suggestions that may help you from going insane when you know you are right but simply can’t get decision-makers to listen.

I covered part of this is a much snarkier post I wrote in November 2008 entitled “How to Sell Social Media to Your Dumbass Boss.”  Some of the precepts I laid out I still believe are true, but having gone from client work to in-house, my views have evolved somewhat.  Here’s my advice when you hit the social media reluctance brick wall:

1. Like any good social media program, your first task is to listen.  Before you tip your hand too much in the direction you want to go, give a “soft sounding” to the person who can either be an ally or an obstacle. Determine what her objections are likely to be and think carefully about how to refute them.  But like a good lawyer, when you are building your case, think carefully about the evidence presented and how you will react to this.  And this is only internal listening.  To the extent that you can, listen to those who are important to your clients or your organization, and find out what they are interested in and from where they get their information.
2. When and where possible (and this is perhaps the most important point of all), get a commitment/dedication to social media as part-and-parcel to your organization’s efforts from the most senior person you can.  Think about it:  legal will want to own it, IT may well want to own it if you are building in-house tools, your communications shop will want to own it, and higher-ups will want to parachute in at the last minute and offer meaningless advice (and I have gotten this one day prior to a site launch) “Black just isn’t really a business color. Change it.”   All of this means that there will be some refereeing that needs to take place and the more senior level commitment you have, the better chances you have to move in the right direction.  Frankly put:  if you are going to get into a pissing match with people who want to own the social media function, have a big person who has your back.
3. Be a teacher first and an evangelist second.  My experience has been that the more senior people are in an organization (and I mean internal and external clients), the more removed they are from truly understanding how you can augment, extend and improve your organization’s communications efforts through a good social media program.  This is not true in all cases, but (insert eye-roll here), “my daughter has the Facebook” is actually a teaching moment.  This is an opportunity to point out that personal and business social media accounts have different objectives, purposes and desired outcomes.  This may not always work, but if you find a generational gap, you have the opportunity to have what we used to euphemistically call a “teaching moment.”  Not all teaching sticks, however.Also, when you are teaching, remember to use benefit-oriented statements and language that people will understand.  When you introduce or explain Twitter, an explanation of “a micro-blogging platform with a 140 character limit” will ultimately result in a glazed over look, especially if you are dealing with a knowledge or generation gap.  Something that may lead to more success would be a statement like “Twitter is a place online where people can follow us and hear what we have to say.  And we can link back to our Web site, drawing more traffic.  Plus, it’s free.”
4. Know thine enemy.  You know it’s coming.  You have seen it.  Like a monster who hides in the closet or under your bed, higher-ups who either are afraid to try or expand on or begin with social media, don’t understand it or are just plain obstructionist, you are going to get the “What’s the ROI on this?”  Suppress your instinct for the eye roll and try explaining that some things can be measured while others cannot.  ”Return on investment” is in and of itself a vague term.  What is a return?  A sale?  An impression?  A plate of pasta? Once that is out of the way, one of the hardest conversations to have and get across is that not everything can be measured. Listening, creating feedback, engaging in dialogue may or may not be measurable. This is tricky.  If you are pressed,  and especially working in-house, I use the (ducking here) metric of cost per contact.  I take the total expenditures of something that I measure divided by the number of measureable interactions.  This is a slippery slope because a Web site visit does not mean engagement – you know it and I know it- but if someone wants a statistic, give them a bone to chew on.  And gently suggest that in something like marketing, it’s also very difficult to make a direct connection between building awareness and relationships – and making a connection to sales.  When I was teaching, I hammered home the point that the difference between public relations and marketing is that marketing is about generating revenue.  Both are about building awareness, but marketing, like social media, is hard to tie to a statistic.
5. Begin with baby steps.  If you don’t already have a big-time social media program, start small.  Try a Twitter account (easily measureable for those who crave statistics).  Nothing succeeds like success, so find a platform that works for you that is discreet and upon which you can build success.
6. If competitors and doing it right, point this out as well.  Competitors mean competition, and if your competition is building a online profile that demonstrates success, this is a good argument too.
7. Finally (and I could go on and on on this topic), know when to say “when.” Sometimes, you are simply not going to make headway.  This is something that I hear from my friends all of the time who have tried the above tactics and more and are left with an empty arsenal and a gun in their mouths.   You have a couple of choices.  You can bear it and try other ways (other internal clients or other agency clients to focus on), or you can go nuts.  And if you are going nuts from frustration, go home and look yourself in the mirror and ask if it’s worth it.  I get that it’s still a bad economy and that changing jobs is risky, but there are enough studies to show that stress causes illness.  Is it really worth it?  Ask yourself this very difficult question and consider getting the hell out of Dodge and on to somewhere will you have the resources and support you need to be successful.

Like Porky Pig said, “that’s all, folks.”  Please feel free to add more of your suggestions in the comments.

Mark

©2012 intersection of online and offline. All Rights Reserved.

In this morning’s Washington Post there is an article entitled “Tweets tweet our emotional status.”  This article is both mundane and presents and screamingly firm grasp of the obvious.

The premise of the article is as our moods change, so do the tone of our tweets.  Well, duh.  An excerpt:

Optimism is reborn with each new day and slowly erodes as we work, study and go about our quotidian affairs. Our mood lifts as we head home to friends, family, entertainment and beer. Our outlook tends to be sunnier on weekends. And speaking of sun, when it starts to pile up in the spring or disappear in the fall, that affects our mood, too.

Well, there’s some groundbreaking news.  We hate work, errands, and love to party.  I know very few people who, on their deathbeds would say “Gosh, I wish I had done just one more day at work…[cue EKG sound of flat-lining].

There are a couple of things that caught my eye in the article, which to be honest, is not really worth reading unless you have not make the connection that we tend to share our emotions with others – or are perhaps more likely to do so via social media.  But here’s something interesting:

A new study in the journal Science examined the contents of more than 500 million tweets sent in 84 countries over two years, looking for signs of good moods and bad. It found what a lot of us could tell by looking at our own lives.

Let me see if I get this straight:  it took people or Cornell University two years, 500 million tweets and 84 countries to prove that people have emotions that go up and down and are shared via Twitter?  Wow!  And if you are a Cornell alumni donor, I would think carefully about where your money is going before writing the next check.  I doubt that you are getting a new basketball arena any time soon.

But it was the last part of the article that caused me to spit out my (expensive) Starbucks coffee:

“This is a stone in the foundation of a new social science that is being built,” said Nicholas A. Christakis, a sociologist at Harvard University who was not involved in the research. “We’re in a similar place that we were in in the 17th century with the discovery of the telescope and microscope.”

Telescope.  Microscope.  17th century?  I suppose that sending a man to the moon, working on discovering a cure for cancer or eradicating such diseases as polio are way down on the list.

I think what chafes my saddle sores is that first, this is viewed as serious research rather than a firm grasp of the obvious, or second, a formerly great newspaper like the Washington Post found it newsworthy – in the A section, no less.

What’s next?  ”One billion dollar study from the University of Phoenix shows that giving someone the middle finger in traffic may be tied to annoyance?”

Yeah.  Annoyance like reading this steaming pile of  pseudo-journalism.

Mark

P.S. – I would normally state something here like “Image source:  Washington Post,”  but I am pretty sure they would kick my ass if they read this post.

©2012 intersection of online and offline. All Rights Reserved.

Try saying the title of the post three times fast and you’ll see just part of the problem.

Social media used to be about the word “social,” as in interactions between human beings that, for the most part are civil – and made us all better for having been a part of them.  At some point, I think this has changed in many ways.  With the relative anonymity of email, a blog post, Twitter or Facebook, it’s now a whole lot easier to criticize someone.  I often wonder if my own idea of the offline equivalent of social media, a circle of people at a party, would dissolve into name calling over a topic or a person who is not present.  I doubt it because the face-to-face component of “social” means that a certain level of decorum is established and maintained.  But what is increasingly being blurred is genuine criticism based upon solid opinions and some pretty thin skin that misinterprets it as an attack.  And the odd involvement of third parties.

For some reason, perhaps due to the relative anonymity of the interwebs, people have begun not only to take personally what they perceive to be comments about themselves too seriously, but more bizarre, implied or overt criticism of other people. This is where it gets a little weird.

This week, there was a very public disagreement between Gini Dietrich of SpinSucks (among many other pursuits) and Rick Calvert of BlogWorld.  The dispute did not even involve each other, but Chris Brogan of social media fame.  If you are in social media, you know who Chris Brogan is.  ‘Nuff said.

The past week, Chris Brogan was selling a Webinar for $47 about the inner workings of Google+.   We still have some vestiges of capitalism in this country and Chris has every right to make an offering and see if people bite and fork over $47.  But  Gini offered a point of view that Google+ is in its infancy, still not even released to the public yet, so no one could possibly claim to be an expert, including Chris Brogan.  She wrote in her post, Beware the Google Experts:

…But there are still people out there claiming to have all the secrets because they claim to have introduced Twitter to the business world so surely they understand how Google+ is going to affect your daily life. Add to that, they’ve spent 250 hours inside the tool, learning and using.

If that’s the case, I want their jobs because that means they’ve spent 11 hours, every day, for the past three weeks using Google+.

Sure, it’s my job to stay ahead of the trends and to understand them so that you can short cut your education. But it’s been 24 days.

Not everyone agreed.  In fact, Rick Calvert of BlogWorld (respectfully) disagreed with Gini’s point and asked her to publicly apologize to Chris.  Gini refused to and a debate ensued. His comments in the BlogWorld post (ironically, written by a third party) included the following:

Trust me Chris knows more about Google + and how it works today than just about anyone in the world. And yes I would bet other than taking care of his family it is all he has been doing since the day he got in beta.

“What she should not have done was use a good mans [sic] name to drive traffic to her post and associate his name with said snake oil salesmen. I’m sorry Delores but I don’t see how impugning Chris’ integrity is defensible…Gini consistently has, intentionally or not, besmirched Chris’ reputation and ethics. I still fail to see how that is defensible.

“I don’t see anyone who agrees with your opinion saying you did otherwise. You should apologize publicly. That’s my opinion.

So Gini said (and I am paraphrasing) that it was way too early to declare one’s self as a Google+ expert, and to do so was questionable.  Rick countered with the fact that he thought that Gini was singling out Chris as a charlatan or snake oil salesman – and had in the past as well.

The BWE post does not number comments, but there are lot and you should read them.  I did, and I even commented, to which Rick replied.

My point about all of this is that the “kerfuffle” (borrowing a word from Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson) a debate over a third person. So we are criticizing the criticizers and then an “amen chorus” follows in a stream comments?  It’s like a wave of third party regurgitation washing up on the shores of social media island.

Bob LeDrew also weighed in in his own blog post this week:

What concerns me is that there seems to be a feeling that there are people whose actions are beyond criticism in the social media sphere. Criticism not as in someone is gauche, has bad breath, or is stupid. Criticism as in “this is an inappropriate venture”; “you’re wrong”; “The facts don’t bear out your argument”; or “you’re contradicting what you said last week. Which is it?”

I agree with Bob.  There is snarkiness hidden behind a blog post and there is legitimate questioning – and then there is “slander” – a word that Rick used.  They are all different. It’s a fine line that is increasingly being interpreted as open warfare I think that Gini made some legitimate points and that Rick is friends with Chris and felt the need to defend him.  Again, the discourse was, for the most part, civil but I can’t help but wonder what started such a debate about a third party.  I mean, Chris is a big boy and take quite ably take care of himself.

I have felt the wrath of others myself. Oh, boy, have I:

Yeah, I got snarky in March 2009 (post is entitled “Shut Up, Mr. Scoble” when the Scobelizer made comments about the public relations industry – that in which I have worked for more than 15 years, that include the following:

• “PR is dead.  The way that PR is practiced is just..lame.”
• “Most of PR has ’sucked.’  If you think it’s not, just be a blogger for a little while. And watched the thousands of stupid-ass pitches flow through your screen.”
• “Anybody who pitches you on email is stupid.  The chance that I am going to listen to anyone who pitches me email on frikkin’ email is one percent.”
• [Someone] showed me a block of wood…that was better than the stupid-ass pitches I get in email.”
• People who stand up for the PR industry, they just don’t get it.”

I took offense to this – big time – and my major point was the following:

If you become an A-Lister and make a good living (while many of very good public relations people in this country are being laid off, by the way) it is beyond self-absorption to complain about “stupid-ass pitches” that you receive because of the very notoriety that you sought, built and benefit from.  You even mentioned that you get pitches from people who are panicked that their companies are going to go out of business – and call them “lame.”

I’m not enough of a A-Lister (hell, I am probably not a C-Lister) so Mr. Scoble never responded.  But again, like the situation that I described above, a third person took up the cause for Scoble, John Aravosis in his own post, “Robert Scoble is Right“.  Without naming me – I am the “one public relations ‘expert’” (but linking to my blog post – thanks for all of the click-throughs, John):

It was suggested by one public relations ‘”expert,” the one who posted the shirtless picture of Scoble, that Scoble deserved the spam he got because he’s a successful blogger [editors note: I was not the one who took off my shirt and had pictures taken.  He did].

Regardless of whether Scoble, I, or anyone else wanted “the notoriety,” I’m not sure how that excuses a PR expert, who is presumably paid a good deal of money to promote their boss or client, from sending a bad pitch to the wrong guy.

PR Expert: I emailed Scoble and Aravosis the latest pitch about the new floor wax our client is selling.

Client: You asked a tech blogger and a political blogger to write about our floor wax? How does it help us get the message out there about our new product by sending it to people who we know, in advance, don’t even write about products like ours?

PR Expert: They’re A-listers and they wanted the notoriety – they deserve whatever they get!

That’ll be $50,000 up front, and $20,000 a month in retainer.

I am not going to revisit Aravosis’ comments – that I still disagree with – but again, this debate took place over a third person. Has social media devolved into a spitball match with a degree of anonymity in which we are not allowed to lodge what we believe to be honest and insightful criticisms of others without third parties taking us to task, defending their buddies?

I sure hope not, because then through legitimate discourse and criticism, the criticism becomes slander, the defensible becomes the indefensible and the “social” goes out of “social media.”

I sure as hell hope not.

Mark

©2012 intersection of online and offline. All Rights Reserved.