Twitter, Facebook, and the Ballroom

by Chris Abraham on June 19, 2009 · 1 comment

Tools don’t matter, and the best ones get out of the way, allowing people to connect more easily and effectively. That was my big takeaway from last Friday’s second-annual Blog Potomac.

Obsessing about “what’s next” in online services and technology saps too much valuable attention away from what’s really important: connecting with people. We need to stop obsessing on what comes after Twitter and focus instead on how best to connect to, communicate with and relate to our clients, colleagues and consumers.

Here’s why: The internet, with all of those fun time-sync tools, is supposed to make connecting with people more efficient. Social networks, blogs, microblogs and forums destroy the previously prohibitive barriers to efficient communications: moving people physically around the planet and making sure they’re in the same place at the same time. But the downside of all of this efficiency is that too many of us lose track of the forest for the trees.

Imagine obsessing the way we do about cool tools in the ballroom at the local Marriott, where many a meeting is held. The physically convenient, affordable hotel with rooms for visitors and plenty of elbow room and resources is not the focus, but encouraging connection, communication, brainstorming, relationship-making and business is.

Hotels, conference centers, message boards, instant messengers, social networks and blogs are just communication aids — the journey, not the destination. Even Second Life, World of Warcraft, Xbox Live, MMOGs and MMORPGs are more about real people spending their real lives with each other than about wanton sex or video games.

So, why has asynchronous global communications reduced living, breathing people into user IDs and handles? At Blog Potomac, folks like Shel Holtz, Liz Strauss and Scott Monty all mentioned how persistently important to their practices the humble, hundred-year-old telephone is when it comes to connecting, especially during a crisis. I moved back from Berlin primarily because folks wanted to get me into the room, take a look into my eyes and see how firmly I shake hands — all things I believed didn’t matter as long as I did the work. Not true!

I had started thinking about these sort of things at the Social Media Camp NY in 2008 when I heard a talk by Howard Greenstein and Dean Landsman on “What Old Media can teach New Media: Media Convergence & Integration, Social Media, and Professionalism.” Long story short, Greenstein and Landsman posit there is a direct evolutionary link between the Lascaux cave drawings and the blogger. I agree with them.

The conclusion is that what makes digital PR and social media marketing challenging and new is not the technology or the tools, it is the unique culture of online conversation. If you focus too much on the tools, you might forget that virtual communities are not virtual. If you don’t learn to love, respect and appreciate virtual online communities as real homes to real people, as real as the village square, the parish hall, the Paris Tabac or the alumni group, then you’re underestimating the passion, loyalty and deep personal relationship found there.

This lack of understanding and appreciation will almost always result in a tragic faux pas, the likes of which may result in brand suicide. You can easily avoid this if you understand the operative word in the phrase Virtual Online Community is “community.”

(Via AdAge DigitalNext)

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Attention Spammers: Your Comments Suck!

by Chris Abraham on June 17, 2009 · 1 comment

At the beginning of this month I warned you that you would be getting loads and loads of “almost human” comments that just didn’t sound right, Don’t be fooled by next gen comment spamming.  Well, I have another set of them and each one is worse than the last:

comment Spam

How about those guys, eh?  Long story short, please look for some of these things when you consider passing comments through Askismet or when you’re looking through your approved comments — because I know you’re hungry for comments and I know you might consider pushing them through just to get a comment count — but please reconsider:

  1. Is the comment directly relevant to either your blog post or a previous comment?
  2. Does the commenter come from another blog, from Twitter, or a social network?
  3. Related, does the commenter link back to a commercial or ecommerce site?
  4. Is the comment simply supportive or adoring but not specific?
  5. Is the grammar bizarre and stilted? (Bad grammar is par for the course online)

Well, if you have a spate of comments that are suffering from the above, please be vigillant and please delete them with extreme prejudice.

Sadly (and comment spammers please take note), since I don’t receive very many comments on my blogs, I am always rooting for the spammers because where these spammers to really offer value, be relevant, and actually spend some time reading the post and making a proper witty or insightful comment, I would pass it through — I have done it before as a little reward for commenting and doing it right (I am sure you have, too).

Would you pass shamelessly self-promoting comment spam if the commenter were to spend some time being witty, charming, relevant, and contextual?  Please let me know in the comments!

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Your “fart jokes” will be heard globally

by Chris Abraham on June 15, 2009 · 0 comments

The Doc Morris condom ads depicted Hitler, as well as Mao Zedong and Osama Bin Laden.

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It’s not “signeruppers”, it’s participants

by Jonathan Trenn on June 10, 2009 · 2 comments

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

Much has been made about the supposed millions flocking over to Twitter to sign up for their accounts on the microblogging service.  While that’s truly impressive, it’s also misleading because it is not a clear indication of the impact that Twitter has had on our culture.

It’s taken a study by Harvard, followed by one by HubSpot to pop a big whole in the balloon of hype surrounding the service.  This shows me a flaw in the way that many of us view social media.  Too often, to many of us stray for the concept that it is participatory phenomenon.  Sure, one can silently watch and read content.  But not with Twitter.

Let’s take a look at some of the stats.

  • Just 10% of the users on Twitter create 90% of the content.  For most social networks, it is 30% of the users.
  • 55.50% are not following anyone
  • 52.71% have no followers
  • 54.88% have never tweeted

There are other stats, but for my point, those are the most important.  It’s obvious that of the millions that are signing up, the vast majority of them don’t end up taking the time to really participate.  They kick the tires, perhaps don’t understand it, and move on and don’t come back.

To an extent, that’s because the way Twitter is set up.  It IS difficult to understand at first.  Getting  oneself “off the ground” can be a challenge.  What to write in an update?  Whom to follow?  Or find whom to follow?  How do I get followed?  Those are legitimate stumbling blocks for the new user.  Enough of a stumbling block to make new users non-users.

The problem here isn’t social media.  It is a bit of Twitter’s – it shows a definite need to streamline the complex way of getting started on Twitter.  But the biggerst problem could be for those of us looking to encompass Twitter consluting strategies in our bevy of services.  If we don’t take into consideration the fact that Twitter is a concept that could end up being overhyped by all sorts of commentators – the mainstream media, other marketers, etc. – to the point that it loses (somewhat unfairly) it’s sizzle.

Twitter is and should continue to be a very important communications vehicle for organizations looking to get communicate, listen, and develop relationships.  Savvy firms will understand this as they establish quality relationships, offer compelling content, and listen and respond attentively to concerns.  But they will also need to show clients and prospective clients that they too understand and can see through the hype to deliver effective strategies.

That’s because the key to social networks is PARTICIPATION.  For Twitter, even more so.  On Facebook, one can put up a bunch of info on one’s self which offers others a lot of opportunity to get to know that person.  Not so with Twitter.  One’s own participation on Twitter is a matter of dedication.  And participation on behalf of an organization is a skill.

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Don’t be fooled by next gen comment spamming

by Chris Abraham on June 2, 2009 · 3 comments

A month ago, my friend Effie from SI started asking me about some comments she has been getting on her blogs.  She wondered if they were, in fact, spam comments or just ESL comments by folks who wanted to say howdy and thanks but didn’t have much to say.  Here’s an example of what to look out for:

Newest generation of blog comment spam

I will make a point of adding as many as I come upon.  They look almost human but here are a couple ways to discern: they don’t specifically address the content of your post or write anything that adds value to your post or any preceeding comments.  Also, check out the link they drop.

Most of the time, folks who comment on your site are a lot like you — if they drop an affilliate site link or a commerce site link into the Author info, then it is not a real human, probably either a new generation of auto content generation robotic script, written to sneak past AKISMET, or it is a very poorly-paid “meat bot” who is being paid close to nothing to churn through piles of blogs, filling out Captcha forms and dropping in these “hand-written” comments.

Let me know if you have any questions and please keep your eyes out.  I will drop more in as I find them.  Don’t be fooled!

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Thanks for blogging about The Conversation Behind Closed Doors

by Chris Abraham on June 1, 2009 · 0 comments

We at Abraham Harrison LLC are pretty happy about the response we have received from bloggers, on Twitter, and online to a recent outreach we did on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce and Baird’s CMC in support of their new study, The Conversation Behind Closed Doors — Inside the Boardroom: How Corporate America Really Views Africa (be sure to read the full executive summary here in HTML and PDF). Long story short: thanks so much for all of your support, bloggers and writers!  We so appreciate your support!

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Why haven’t the kids taken to Twitter?

by Chris Abraham on June 1, 2009 · 0 comments

Cem Sertoglu read through my rant about why Twitter hype is not Second Life hype and asked me this question, “@chris – thanks for the comment here. very insightful. how about the issue with kids not using twitter?” I responded in a comment (and here):

Well, “kids” don’t blog either.  Kids won’t blog until they feel empowered enough to start creating on their own accord or until they find it useful — hell, “kids” might never ever take to Twitter, except that they will want to engage with TMZ Staffers on Twitter (@harveylevintmz @daxholt @ninaparkertmz @lmharris70 @carolynafenton @frankvelardo) because there will be loads of kids who will get on board to be able to stalk their favorite celebs and stars.

But who knows.

Rockers and fans are still on MySpace and the “kids” have yet to bail on Facebook (yet) so we’ll see what happens.

It is very odd to see how the median age for blogging and twittering is much older than you would think: “the median age of a Twitter user is 31. In comparison, the median age of a MySpace user is 27, Facebook user is 26 and LinkedIn user is 40.7,” according to Pew.

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Why Twitter’s hype is not like Second Life’s hype

by Chris Abraham on June 1, 2009 · 1 comment

One of my favorite clients, Fabrice Grinda, believes that Twitter is hype, Twitter Skepticism — the kind of ugly hype associated with Second Life. Well, I consider this a very fine challenge, so I left a comment — well, I left an entire rant, and didn’t even get into talking about organic SEO, PageRank, and the like.  Tell me what you think:

Long story short, Twitter is light, cheap, open, and permanent where Second Life is heavy, expensive, closed, and ephemeral.

Twitter does everything right where Second Life failed. Second Life was amazingly heavy, requiring lots of computer, lots of bandwidth, and a commitment to client software; SecondLife is a closed system, a walled city, completely invisible to serendipity and coincidence; Second Life is greedy, pushing avarice and commerce; Second Life is ephemeral and anti-textual, meaning that all of the work and all of the energy one spent on Second Life invariably went away the moment people stopped investing time and money into the platform.  While there was a programming language, a scripting language, and lots of room for creativity, Second Life was not nearly as agnostic and open a platform as it could have been.

On the other hand, Twitter is open, has a fantastically generous API (Open API as opposed to a Closed API), Twitter is highly textual, highly “contagious,” and very much real time.

Google always wants to know it is up-to-date, that it is on top of everything. They’re constantly insecure that they will lose the war to upstarts, and when it comes to Zeitgeist 2.0 — real time trend-tracking and trend-recognition, Twitter moves even faster than “breaking news” scrawls and updates.

The most famous example is the rapidity with which the Twittersphere responds to tragic events like earthquakes, tornadoes, and terrorist events like the shootings in #mumbai.

For a second, let’s forget www.twitter.com and look at how differently people access and engage with Twitter.  Not only can one interface via the web or via 40404 via SMS, as a human, but there are not hundreds of desktop clients, iPhone and smart phone apps, and through hundreds of 3rd party mash up and rehashing sites and services.

That’s what’s funny: a large proportion of the API calls to Twitter these days aren’t even made by humans twittering all day long.  I large proportion of calls to the servers are made by 3rd party search engines, are made by third party services that offer sundry services: finding friends, tracking news, graphing conversation, tracking searches, plotting trends, collecting metrics, following people, unfollowing people.

In many ways, the Twitter platform has become almost a fungible INPUT / OUTPUT flow of data, like IP or like tap water, or like the electrical mains — all the creativity and all of the development is happening as a result of this relatively featureless and structureless raw platform.

Everybody admits that the elegance of Facebook’s interface does an amazing job of hand-holding the diverse levels of technological prowess that Facebook users posses; however, Facebook shares many things in common with Second Life: it is a walled-garden, it is very cliquey and very hard to cross-pollenate, and finally — Facebook works very hard at defining what the user experience is to the best of its ability in a world where openness and open access can oftentimes work for you instead of against you.

The biggest problem that Social Network Service and Online Virtual Communities make is being too invested in the outcome of how the community will grow and develop.  In order to be successful in community development and community creation, one must be committed to the community and meeting their needs versus being committed to giving them what the community producer thinks the community wants and needs — often very different things.

At the end of the day, Twitter has always been more like the cardboard box the toy can in than the toy itself — Twitter seems to have built the perfect box to play in and with until you decide what sort of toy you want to build — and then Twitter makes it possible for everyone and their brother to take a go at building the toy in the box, always just focusing on being the most amusing, easy-to-use, scalable, and compelling box possible.

To me, Twitter is a lot like IRC from back in the day. When you install Inter-Relay Chat, there are no rooms and there are no members. Only by engaging and by creating rooms and groups (Twitter and IRC share the same conventions in terms of using the hash, #, to indicate a self-organizing group that only exists as long as people choose to use it.

People who don’t get Twitter really have not spent enough time with it.  There are tons of ways people can use Twitter.  Many people use Twitter as an alternative to an RSS feed news reader, following the Twitter feeds of news organizations and news alerts, including links and so forth. Twitter doesn’t care how you use it: passive reading or active conversation.

In fact, Twitter is such a neutral solution that you might very well forget that you’re a member, which is why there might be a perception that over 60% of all of the users who register never go back: Twitter doesn’t want to be too much trouble.

Well, that’s all I got for now.

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You Can’t Sell a Nothing Burger to Bloggers

by Chris Abraham on May 28, 2009 · 0 comments

Hamburger
Image via Wikipedia

Taylor Donlan (hire him), employee number one at Abraham Harrison LLC, emeritus, started our hallowed tradition of ensuring our clients provided us with a worthwhile gift to our bloggers,  be it embargoed news, exclusive content, newsworthiness, humor, a perfect fit, or even a $2 off coupon in the case of Snuggle Creme — and if you’re honest, is it entertaining?

When all is said and done, earned media blogger PR doesn’t cut it unless bloggers are willing to take up the cause and blog about our clients. We’re not a paid placement company like some and we can’t make anyone do anything, especially bloggers who are the epitome of cat herding.  They need to choose us, we can’t just tap them.

When we have a kick-off meeting about a new client, we always carefully consider whether what the client has to offer is compelling enough to actually earn coverage online — and they oftentimes don’t make the grade.

In fact, we recently went through this ourselves and we discovered that this needed to become a collaborative litmus test: Dan didn’t think the US Investment in Africa Study had any legs because it was academic but Mark and I knew there were lots of other Foreign Affair wonks like us in the blogosphere; Mark and I didn’t think bloggers would want to blog about Snuggle Fabric softener, but Dan knew he had a star on his hands and the metrics proved true: more earned media blog posts and tweets ever in our history, to date!

In fact, we have done a lot of thinking about this:

Why am I on about this this morning?  Well, my friend Sally Falkow did it again in the form of her latest blog post Online Success is About Telling Stories:

Every business is now a publisher, said Vaynerchuk.  The right content is the key to engagement. But you have to figure out what content will fill a need for your audience.  It’s about providing information, being useful and being entertaining.

[...]

It’s vital to be listening to your audience and responding with content that makes sense and offers value.  The major shift in media consumption, and the low barrier to entry for publishing online, make it possible for anyone and everyone to create content.

[...]

Success online is about telling stories and producing great content. The right content creates engagement.  Engagement creates loyal followers and customers.

So true.

In order to be compelling enough to attract bloggers to blog about you or your clients, you must be appealing, you must be attractive, and you must be willing and able to tell your story, share your process, and tease out your narrative.

Our favorite clients thinks about this quite a lot — the best clients to work with generally already get “entertaining:” advertising agencies and content companies.

At the end of the day, if we are handed a nothing burger by our client, it is off to the drawing board to develop the story, to explore a narrative, to ask the right questions and prospect the right bloggers and self-selected interest groups.

Sometimes, even with the best narrative ever and the most generous gifts, you wind up with a nothing burger with nothing sauce and you sit back and scratch your head.  What we have discovered over time is that these sorts of failures often have to do with targeting, messaging, or oftentimes both.

This happened to us recently as well.  Perfect gift, great story, excellent narrative, the whole nine yards; however, we were reaching out to Central and South America in Spanish and Portuguese.  Well, Latin America hated our messaging for cultural reasons.  In many Spanish-speaking countries, young, successful, wealthy entrepreneurs are considered villians instead of being heroes, a very American view.

We didn’t need to change our gift, we just needed to change our angle of attack which came down to our messaging, our pitch, and a couple-few adjustments to our Social Media News Release and that did the trick!  It was cultural!

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US Investment in Africa Study Interview with Francois Baird

by Chris Abraham on May 26, 2009 · 0 comments

We have finally had an opportunity to work with one of our favorite partners, Baird’s CMC, for a very cool project called The Conversation Behind Closed Doors — Inside the Boardroom: How Corporate America Really Views Africa.  Here’s an audio interview I did last week of Francois Baird about the project.

“An inside-the-boardroom survey of attitudes toward corporate investment in Africa among leading U.S. corporations. The information was gathered between January and November 2008 in a series of closed door interviews with senior officers of 30 American Fortune 100 corporations by senior associates of Baird’s CMC.”

Here’s the link to the Social Media News Release (SMNR) and the full executive summary in HTML and PDF as well as an interview I recorded last week with Francois Baird at the US office of Baird’s CMC in DC.

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