Posts with tag "social media"

The Book That Will Make Any Blogger Want To Take A Shower

  • Category: Technology
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  • Posted 244 days ago

I’ve never hidden the fact that I don’t think very much of social media or social networks (the social web is another matter) and that for the most part it is nothing more than just another way for marketers to get all slimey and make you believe that social media is the great social changer.

Ya, okay.

With this in mind I came across a book by Ryan Holiday titled “Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator” and if there ever was an insider book to read this is it, especially when it comes to social media and blogging. It’s an honest look at just how easily the whole blogging industry can be manipulated and a thoroughly enjoyable book to read; even if you do feel like taking a shower afterwards.

You can pick it up on Amazon in print, Kindle, or audio book format; and I don’t very often recommend books but if you are a blogger, or even someone interested in social media, you should maybe give this a good read.

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Our red/blue Facebook pill moment has arrived

There has been a shitload of discussion happening around the web when it comes to the Facebook announcement at their f8 developer conference. You know, the one where they have decided that you don’t need the rest of that silly web anymore because they are going to make your electronic womb all nice and cozy with a never ending steam of mental pablum from your vast world of friends.

As Ethan Kaplan said in a post – identity has now been externalized and it will reside on Facebook (that is also where I got the title for this post); and he is right, we are being convinced that in order to have any value we need to be connected to a world created by Facebook (and yes, the same can be said for Google+). It is only by letting them present our identity and life events to the world that they exist.

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If you are using a ghostwriter on Twitter you don’t have a clue about social media

An interesting story showed up over at All Twitter about how a ghostwriter for a so-called social media and Internet marketing professional had been fired and then proceeded to out the “expert” on the self-same Twitter account after finding out that the password hadn’t been changed.

The “expert” in question is Mark Davidson who apparently has not one but three, or rather now two since the firing, ghostwriters for his Twitter account. Now with a bit of a disclaimer I have been following Mark Davidson on Twitter, and now Google+, for a long time but never clicked on the fact that it was ghostwriters populating his stream.

I don’t care so much that Mark got outed but rather the fact that the idea of using ghostwriters to populate your Twitter timeline with so-called social media gems of wisdom shows exactly how social media has become a joke.

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The increasing, and important, need for dual identities on the web – real and anonymous

  • Category: Opinion, Social
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  • Posted 640 days ago
image courtesy of The Next Web

image courtesy of The Next Web

The whole anonymous identities on the web argument is older than the web itself. I can remember fervent discussions on the subject back in the old BBS days and the talking points haven’t changed in the intervening years. The only problem now is that the wild west days of the Web are over and companies like Facebook and Google are making themselves the final arbiters of what an identity is on the web; and that is scary.

However that isn’t the argument that I want to look at here, at least not as a major point. What I do want to point out is that now more than ever we need to fight for the right to have more than just the Facebook and Google sanctioned identity when we do anything on the web, and possibly when we aren’t hooked into it directly.

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googleplus

Twitter needs to worry about Google+ – Not bloody likely.

Google+ is only five days old at the writing of this post and hasn’t even through its trial by fire as it is still in limited field trials, and yet we already have the social media pundits writing ad naseum about how Twitter, and Facebook (but that’ll be another post), need to be watching their backs.

Really?

After only five days of being tested by the geekiest of tech geeks, bloggers, and reporters, we’re already claiming that Google+ is a threat to Twitter.

You people need to get a grip and instead of writing vaporous odes to Google+ and the imminent demise of <take your pick of social media network> do your readers a favor and get a cup of coffee and look at what you are talking; or pontificating, about.

Regardless of what Google+ does down the road it isn’t a threat to Twitter. Period.

As I wrote on Google+ a couple of days ago the only threat to Twitter is Twitter itself because of their own incompetence and the constant slapping around of their dwindling developer community.

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confused

Brand Power?

It is inevitable I guess but it seems that every time a discussion about social networks and social media takes place the phrase build your brand invariably comes up. With the launch of Google+ this past week brand once more becomes a talking point especially in regards to the validity of Google’s efforts with G+.

There is no doubt that Google+ has set off a pro and con discussion about this third effort to come up with a viable social network but that isn’t what this post will be discussing, that will come later. Rather I want to visit this concept of individuals as brands, brands that need to be marketed, because this idea of individual brands seems to be a major component of what social media is suppose to be.

First though let’s understand exactly what the word brand, or concept, means. From Wikipedia we get the following:

A brand is the identity of a specific product, service, or business.

The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a “name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers. The legal term for brand is trademark. A brand may identify one item, a family of items, or all items of that seller. If used for the firm as a whole, the preferred term is trade name.” [2]

A brand can take many forms, including a name, sign, symbol, color combination or slogan. The word branding began simply as a way to tell one person’s cattle from another by means of a hot iron stamp. The word brand has continued to evolve to encompass identity — it affects the personality of a product, company or service.

Now let’s understand what a person, or individual, means; and again from Wikipedia we get:

Person - In philosophy, the word “person” may refer to various concepts. According to the “naturalist” epistemological tradition, from Descartes through Locke and Hume, the term may designate any human (or non-human) agent which: (1) possesses continuous consciousness over time; and (2) who is therefore capable of framing representations about the world, formulating plans and acting on them.

Individual - An individual is a person or any specific object or thing in a collection. Individuality is the state or quality of being an individual; a person separate from other persons and possessing his or her own needs, goals, and desires. In his statement Cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”), René Descartes posits the notion of the individual subject, distinct from the world around him or her.

At no point does person or individual ever equate to being a brand, just as a brand doesn’t equal being a person or individual. Yet in our modern Internet world we are constantly told, especially when it comes to social media, that we need to protect our brand, that we need to get our brand out there.

Why are we suddenly placing more value on a thing instead of us as a person?

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Are you a blogger that doesn’t use StumbleUpon? Very Big Mistake!

  • Category: Opinion
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  • Posted 701 days ago

I don’t very often talk about numbers when it comes to my sites, mainly because like the majority of bloggers they aren’t anything to write home about. Also like the majority of bloggers out there I make as much use of social media type buttons to help spread the word about my posts; and again, like most of you, they help a little bit.

However, in light of recent events this past week I have come to one firm conclusion. Any blogger that doesn’t include StumbleUpon as an integral part of their social media outreach they are making a huge mistake.

How big of a mistake?

Well take the following graphic of my basic stats for the month of June to date. That huge hockey stick you see there in the graph .. that’s a StumbleUpon run on one of my posts.

June stats to date

June stats to date for WinExtra - click for larger image

But here’s the pretty incredible part – the post that sparked this run is over a year old, and it isn’t the only post on WinExtra that has had the same loving from StumbleUpon.

None of the other social media related mediums like Twitter or even Facebook come close to producing the kind of traffic that StumbleUpon has. Sure Twitter and Facebook might, and I say might, bring you a surge of traffic during the first couple of hours of your post hitting the web; but the beautiful thing about StumbleUpon is that it really seems to love the long tail.

Not only does StumbleUpon love the long tail but you can have it keep coming back again and again with whole new runs. I have had this happen with a couple of other post where I will get a good solid run and then a couple of months later it will happen all over again.

Of course, as with all the other social media outlets, you have to be careful and not flood StumbleUpon with pointless content, and it is always better if someone else “stumbles” your posts but as long as you are judicious and also spend time stumbling other really good posts from other site StumbleUpon will reward you.

Personally if I had to pick just one of the social media call to action buttons I would have to go with StumbleUpon because as you can see when the StumbleUpon loving starts it can be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Oh and this newest run .. while it has slowed down somewhat today it is still going, now on its fifth day.

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So, Blippy is no more. Well color me surprised

  • Category: Opinion, Technology
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  • Posted 730 days ago

I just finished reading a long winded post over at TechCrunch about the waving good-bye to Blippy – the service that let you share your purchases with anyone who cared.

Things eventually quieted down as they are wont to do in media hype land. And then we kind of stopped writing about it, caught up in the hockey stick growth of Groupon and Facebook and Quora. We stopped writing about it so much so that we missed the fact that it pivoted from a purchase sharing site to a user reviews site, starting with the introduction of user reviews on July 23rd 2010 and then moving of the platform fully on to reviews by October of the same year.

“One of the reasons we switched to reviews was to increase user engagement, but that hasn’t really increased either, “ Kumar told me resigned, revealing that Blippy has 100K registered users and that 30% have shared a purchase — Numbers that are not spectacular. The service never had a clear business model, just an attitude of “get user adoption and we’ll figure it out later.” But later never came.

What did come was the sense (and the whispers and the TechCrunch tips) that Blippy was over and that it was time to move on. For co-founder Philip Kaplan this meant stepping down as CEO to go make a bunch of silly iPhone apps at the end of March, telling PE Hub’s Connie Loizos that Blippy was “doing better than most people could do … But it hasn’t, like, exploded into something huge yet.” Which basically meant that traffic had leveled off. And the loss of its figurehead left many, ourselves included, concerned about the service’s future.

Well the truth is it doesn’t have much of one.

Well gee, I seem to recall suggesting at one point that this had to be one of the stupidest ideas (at the time) and regardless of how many millions were poured into it there was no way that Blippy would succeed.

I’m sorry but there is nothing interesting or fun about this idea. Just as it is nobody’s business as to what goes on in my bedroom, my purchasing habits are just as private and personal. The idea that wrapping it up in a bunch of social media mumbo-jumbo makes sharing that kind of information any better is fundamentally screwed.

Blippy is currently in private beta and this is one person who thinks it should stay there or be prematurely thrown into the deadpool.

Chalk one up for the cranky guy.

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