Image via Wikipedia I am not certain why the viddler link won’t embed properly, so here’s just a link to Merlin Mann’s quite hilarious session where he makes fun of basically every poser-thought-leader-whiz-bang-social-platform possible:
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Nothing sucks worse that a 404 error message. What’s a 404 error? Well, its when you click a dead link on a site and you get “sorry, this page doesn’t exist.” This can happen when a company changes or updates their website, when they yank down a promotion, or generally make changes to the navigation structure of a web site.
But, how cruddy is it when you change your blog URL, causing all the old article links to become dead? For a company, this is really bad form, and for a blogger too, especially if you want to have some kind of credibility. I mean really, how difficult is it to put up proper re-directs?
Bottom line: If you want people to find your amazing prose or deft analysis of something and hope to gain from the “long tail” of search, you will need to do one of two things:
Either way, if you are a company, chances are you’re blogging to improve your SEO, be seen as a thought leader and, generally speaking, gain more business. It makes you look bad if blog links go back to your main web site instead.
If you’re a blogger, you really want people to find your content, so don’t make it hard, otherwise you loose the long tail advantage of keeping your content up there, at least for a period of time.
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Yesterday I listened into Chris Brogan and Radian6’s Twebinar on listening to the social media conversation. One question I saw scroll by in the tweet-roll a number of times was the question of how to get your boss to care about social media measurement and about listening to the conversations. Lennon’s “I’m just a jealous guy” comes to mind.
Is your boss the kind of person who is incensed about attention or positive reviews fawned on your competition? Or, conversely, people misrepresenting your company or products? Well, you won’t know how that’s played out in the social media landscape unless you are tracking it — try showing the boss how a blog post or online news article has legs through reposts, comments, trackbacks, etc. And, the long tail effect of that post will never go away, and will come up in particular Google searches.
You can do a rudimentary job at listening using Summize, Google Blog Search and Technorati, and also BlogPulse. This might give you the low-cost insight your boss may need to understand the value of more extensive listening. These tools are only a basic beginning, because none of these tools give you a way to roll up the big picture information in a comprehensive way:
Gaining a broad picture understanding is really important, because there are so many social computing applications that people are using — and social sites that people are using to connect to others of like mind — that there can be way to much noise to pay attention to. Plus, there’s just no way you can really engage with people across all these areas.
Listening first will help you streamline the process of formulating a good strategy for adding social media into the mix. It helps your company learn what’s important to those invested in the conversations already. Why is that important? Because in this still early and hype-driven fervor to jump both feet first into the social media fray, smart companies will tread carefully by taking smaller steps — the pains of failing big can be deep with criticism, bad press and bad faith from the communities that care.
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A few weeks back, I wrote part 1 of a series on my usage of social media/social computing sites. The goal was to finish this mini-study and have some observations based on my use and non-use of different technologies and updating services.
Last post, I talked about blogging, Twitter and Friendfeed, though since that time I have changed the way I use Friendfeed. I have since joined a few FriendFeed groups about specific conversations - an interesting way to parse the info overload of tracking too many friends. Also, I get a daily email from Friendfeed to let me know everything that happened - including linked comments - on the feeds I follow. So, I can scroll through everything once a day instead of the terminal interruptions. Like a daily feed update from an active blog or news site, this is a very helpful service to me.
Plurk: Calling itself a social journal of your life, Plurk shows your updates in a timeline of other Plurkers. You can upload pictures, comments on other people’s plurks. The goal is to have high karma points, which you get by writing plurks and commenting on other plurks.
I am a very occasional Plurker - really, I wanted to check it out, and like a new piece of technology that I don’t necessarily have a big use for, my interest has fizzled. Or plurked. The basic problem I have with Plurk is that I already have other tools that fill the same purpose, and so I am not looking for a new one, damn my Plurk Karma to hell.
SocialThing!: SocialThing aggregates all of my feeds in one place and is destination oriented, so I don’t visit much. But, really I don’t have to, because no matter where I post — here, Facebook, Twitter, etc - its all tracked through SocialThing! I’ve got a soft spot for them because they are local AND useful, and, now that they were bought by AOL they may be able to do some more innovative things, so I will watch and experiment.
MySpace: Sucks, lets be frank. I created a profile for my dog about 2 years ago, to check it out with low commitment. He even blogged (he’s very smart, part border collie). But, the only people who wanted to friend me (besides my nephew) were 18-25 y.o. women who wanted to show me pictures of their fake breasts. Yawn. Oh yes, and its extremely slow. I do visit MySpace pages of music groups, but never login to my account. I can’t even remember my login. Anyone remember what it is?
Facebook: Facebook is my social network of choice, used for both professional (not as much, though I have cemented business deals using it) and personal use. Like most people of my age, I’ve re-connected with old friends from school, friends who’ve moved away, relatives and have kept up business friendships here as well. I use it to:
I don’t like Facebook’s new layout, and have stuck with the old one. Facebook has pretty decent search functionality and makes it easy to find people you know. Generally speaking, Facebook is my social network of choice because I have much invested in it, I have a lot of connections, and it is personally useful and fun.
Next post on this subject will include LinkedIn, Plaxo, Flickr, Pandora, IntenseDebate, StumbleUpon.
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Recently, David Alston of Radian6 posted a picture, using Twitpic, of a current magazine ad for FruitLoops that freaked him out. I got the idea that he wants his kids to have healthy eating habits.
He was incredulous - is FruitLoops really trying to pass off their cereal as a good snack — a good breakfast? It tells moms that they can “feel good giving their kids a nutritious snack that won’t come back in their lunch box.” Here’s the offending ad (sideways, unfortunately, can’t figure out why it doesn’t orient properly):
A nutritious snack? FruitLoops? Last I checked, something that had a first ingredient of sugar was considered junk food. But, lets just check the nutrition label from a box of FruitLoops:
Yup, just as I suspected. High sugar, no fiber, a micron of protein - which certainly means energy, but a short burst, instead of a real satisfying snack that would keep you going.
Have advertisers really come that far from these ads, circa the 1950’s and 1960’s?
Doesn’t seem so to me. Here’s an ad from the 1950’s I’ve lovingly titled “7Up Baby.” Though its hard to read (but is easily found online), the gist of the ad is that 7Up is so natural, that its ok for even a baby to drink it. So go ahead, give that 7 month old a good chug-a-lug of 7Up and build up that lifelong craving and desire for white sugar.
How about this one, which came out as a response to artificial sweeteners being added to make low-calorie soda:
Seems like if you’re a good mom, you’ll give your teen (girl) sugar so that she will have the energy to get through her day — and its low calorie, at just 18 calories a teaspoon. ‘Cuz you wouldn’t want Mary to get fat.
My point is, advertising to moms hasn’t changed much. Now, instead of appealing to wholesome American-dream type values, its positioned around the convenient packaging of a ready-to-eat plastic bag of sugary-ness, so that you can spend one less minute making your kids lunch — since we’re all too busy to spend 5 minutes making a healthy lunch. That’s right, kids, a sugary snack is a nutritious snack.
Seeing these ads - and as many on TV that make moms/wives look like stupid dolts who get supreme life satisfaction out of: getting their husbands to eat oats, or a clean toilet bowl, or a really good dustrag - makes me downright depressed about how wives and mothers are still portrayed in media and advertising.
I guess my point is I am not surprised at the FruitLoops ad. Apparently, the market research shows that parents think cereal is a healthy snack (though this and other stories tend to refute that), so, as an extrapolation, FruitLoops must be too. But really, how many parents really believe that? And, have advertisers, who’ve been criticized for targeting children with ads for unhealthy food, really done much to change?
Oh, and don’t think I have it in for just FruitLoops and Kellogg’s. Plenty of the high-end brands sold as “natural and healthy” have as much or more sugar in their cereals, too. Organic sugar isn’t any better than plain old sugar, when it comes to sugar cereal. It’s just more expensive.
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Just as I was thinking about my follow-up post to my own social applications use post, Chris Brogan published an extensive list of social computing apps on his blog - and there are more in the comments, too. You could do nothing but waste time using all these apps.
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Last night’s Mile High Social Media Club at The Whisky Bar in Denver was quite a happening. It’s great to see repeat attendees, plus many new ones as well. And, to top it off, the panel was terrific too.
1 Comment » | moreThough I am really sick of the whole #Motrinmoms controversy, here’s what I will say about it: Brands have treated women and moms the same way for a while - Motrin isn’t doing anything different than the folks at Mr. Clean, Swiffer, Fruit Loops or many others have done …
1 Comment » | more
