Posts with tag "marketing"

The beauty and death of ‘going viral’

It is a term you hear a lot in the myopic world of social media – going viral. All it means is that a video, a post, an advertisement even, has touched a spot in the people who have seen or read something. They then urge all their friends to watch or read the thing that for some reason meant something to them, and then they in turn pass it on to their friends – hence viral.

At the core though there is an intangibility about what makes something go viral. Something that can’t be quantified and nor do I think it should be. The very value of going viral is is that intangibility – the unknown reasons as to why some unplanned thing can rise with meteoritic speed in our personal and social consciousness is what makes it important.

Now though social media marketers are employing all kinds of terminology to quantify what it takes to make something go viral. Is it the music, is it the way the content is presented, is it the way the video is created, is it this, is it that?

Companies are all striving to create the next bit of viral marketing genius so they can be a part of the cool companies. They hire all kinds of social media experts in the hope that these gurus will be able to get their products insinuated within the fabric of viral geekdom. Get the YouTube views, all the cool big name blogs to write about the company’s genius moves, become the trending topic on Twitter.

In the process though these companies and marketing geniuses are only succeeding in doing one thing – destroying the whole reason, and value, of something going viral. A manufactured going viral is just that manufactured – fake, plastic, dead.

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Getting depressed with this whole Social Media thing

This whole Social Media game is becoming increasingly very depressing. I’ve really tried to get past this but instead the feeling only becomes more ingrained. I have tried to slough it off as just a passing phase as a result of too many big old hot air balloons to poke holes in; but it is more than that I think.

After all when you hear a bunch of developers cheering because Facebook has removed a key user data protection element in their insatiable quest to control as much of the Social Web as possible you have to wonder just who is the Web for anymore.

When you hear terms like we’re doing this to improve the social experience; which if anyone decides to look past the warm and fuzzy buzzwords, it is easy to see that this is more about improving the company’s social experience and ability to monetize our activity on the Web. What it isn’t about is us saying what will make our experience better and when we raise questions we are either lumped in with the open web freetards (like it’s a bad thing) or we’re some sort of troglodytes.

Sometimes it feels like Social Media is nothing more than one great big social experiment to see just how far we can be made to shift our perception of what privacy is. It isn’t a shift that is truly benefiting us in anyway. Is it really that important to know immediately what some person who has followed you is listening to? Is it really necessary that we know what some person who has friended you has spent or bought.

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40million

Social Media is the new Internet – Gawd you gotta love hyperbole

As is the habit when Tim O’Reilly pontificates the pundits and guru’s all get one great big enormous woodie and then proceed to fall all over themselves either massaging his words or adding their own dribble onto his latest missive. In this case the starting point for what is sure to be the <puke> next hot topic </puke> to be made into PowerPoint slideshows or start yet another slew of over-priced conferences whose only purpose will be to dissect and market the great words of Mr. Tim was his post about the Internet being the new Operating System.

True to form and well within the First 24 Hour Ruling* we started getting what is bound to be the first of many posts that A) clap themselves on the back for being so prescient and B) use it to justify their own opinions about how they see the Internet. The one that caught my eye this morning as I was trying to work my way through my first pot of coffee was one by Tac Anderson titled If The Internet Is The New Operating System, Social Media is the New Internet (gee .. see how clever he was there – great SEO – as to be expected I guess).

Well before we even delve into the ridiculousness of that suggestion let’s clear up a misconception (for about the 100th time).

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You just had to know I couldn’t let this go by

guru_list BL I love you and if you’re ever in the market for a fan just give a holler because this little gem of number crunching hit my morning LOL meter as I was recovering from a few hard days of coding.

From May 2009 until now we have gone from 4,487 self-professed social media sycophants to nearly 16,000 of them infesting Twitter.

And people wonder why I get cranky over all the bullshit marketing that Twitter is being used for (and yes all those Foursquare and Gowalla messages are marketing crap so don’t bitch about ads).

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The right intention

I’m not sure if this graphic is representative of an real movement or not but it’s message is right on.

Click for full size

[click on image for full size]

found via Design You Trust

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Marketers count on gullibility so you will spam for them

Thumbs Up A big thumbs up to Sarah Perez over at ReadWriteWeb for her excellent post on needing a marketer filter on Twitter. I couldn’t agree more but there’s a couple of things that these marketers, or companies, are doing which is worse than just counting own our gullibility in order to promote their products. After all, as Sarah points out, who wouldn’t want to win a MacBook Pro.

The way they are doing this ‘promotion’ is really just another way to game Twitter, and us, by manipulating what has become an integral part of Twitter – the hashtags. I’ve taken exception before to the abuse of hashtags and how the misuse of them is detrimental to the use of Twitter. By their definition in the Twitter ecosphere hashtags are meant to identify a specific tweet as belonging to a larger conversation on a current ‘hot’ or trending subject.

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The changing face of Public Relations in a Social Media world

TPublicRelationsForDummies here is a lot of press given to all the different businesses that are falling by the wayside – some more graceful than others. Rarely a day doesn’t go by that we don’t hear disparaging words about the newspaper industry, the music industry, on and on and on.

Much of these changing landscapes can be attributed in part to the rise of Social Media but for the most part they were bound to collapse as the Web gained power. Where Social Media though has had the most direct impact has to be the world of marketing and public relations.

As fast at the newspaper industry might find itself in a sea of turbulent change I don’t think it comes close to how marketing and public relations are being forced to constantly re-evaluate how they are doing business. Some are predicting the death of both – but what isn’t being predicted to be dying these days – while others like Brian Solis who think that it is more of a radical and fundamental change that they are undergoing.

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ReTweets: The next marketing playground

tweet-retweet-450 Twitter is an interesting ecosphere to watch, and participate in.

At its roots the service is incredibly simple and designed apparently from the ground up to be that way. Things like replies, hashtags and retweets all originated from within the community of users rather than from Twitter itself. Even to this day there is no special recognition, or inclusion, of these community created identifiers by Twitter – that is left up the the Twitter client developers.

There are no hard and fast rules for how identifiers like hashtags or retweets are suppose to be used. After all how can there be when there are none for Twitter itself.

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