Stop doing the same presentation.

Social media has built a cottage industry of self promoting pseudo experts. We all hate them. We all hate them to the point where, each one of you is thinking of a specific person who you think I’m talking about. That person? They hate social media douchebag guru ninjas, too.

So, it’s a problem, yes?

I’ve found a simple identifier: if you can hear someone giving the same presentation, the same advice, and the same examples, more than 6 months apart, they are likely terrible at what they do.

They need to stop giving the same presentation.

They are teaching you social media 101, using last year’s assistant profs notes, and a photocopied version of an out of date textbook.

This is a changing space. Rapidly changing. Massively changing.

And while I would never suggest everything new is relevant, even if google shoehorns it into search results at a baffling level, it is usually worth understanding.

Someone who is still stopping at “listen before you talk”, or “it’s about brand love” is still talking about 3 or 4 years ago. When this was still new enough that there wasn’t data. When this was still new enough that you had to convince clients it was important, rather than convincing them that they need more of a strategy than “we need to be on social media”.

The dummies books have been written. Repeatedly. You don’t have to keep preaching the gospel of “I understood twitter in 2008”.

Instead, a few polite suggestions:

Get some f**king data, to back up your assertions.

Stop pretending it’s simple. It’s only simple if you aren’t optimizing it. Expertise isn’t about stopping at simple.

Things are (always) different. Examples more than 6 months old are likely no longer representative of the current platform and community dynamics.

“Entry level” changes. If you’re giving the same ‘how to get started in social’ advice today, that you were giving even a year ago, you’re a fraud. Pick a new scam, please.

You can’t be a revolutionary after the war is won. You’ve either decided to become a productive member of post war society, or you’ve ended up unable to let go of the fight.

So either grow up with the rest of us, or pick a new fight.

Data Invisibility, Cost vs Benefit

A few years ago, I had a conversation with a good friend about someone we had both gone to school with, about a decade ago. They had just kind of dropped off the radar, and neither of us had heard anything. We didn’t think too much of it, but it became a sporadic topic of conversation, almost a game: why can’t we find any trace of this person online, anywhere?

Over the years I checked social networks, googled a few dozen things a few dozen times, scrolled through photos and status updates of people who I knew used to be close to them, and still never really heard anything.

Understand, this wasn’t a serious investigation. I just found it odd that someone had remained so offline, and when their name arose again in conversation, I’d spend ten or twenty minutes seeing if I could track them down, this time. It was weird to lose track of a person to completely, in this day and age.

We used to throw theories back and forth; was this person dead? Moved to a country with less infrastructure? Changed their name, entered witness protection, joined an Amish community?

I found out not that long ago that essentially, to drop off the grid, it takes removal from mainstream society - the person in question had spent a period of time homeless. I only found this out when they appeared on (obviously) facebook, in conversation with someone else.

The reason I’m bringing all of this up, is that this is the reality of ‘total privacy’. Our online and offline societies are becoming so intertwined that you would need to withdraw from one, to withdraw from the other. The assumption that not using social media, or not owning a computer or smartphone, would keep you offline, is absurd. No one would argue that by not owning a camera, you can avoid having your picture taken. No one would suggest that you could avoid being written about by not keeping a diary.

The options for someone with severe fears about privacy, in a networked, social media driven society, are not exactly pleasant: you can participate actively despite your fears, you can passively be made a participant by those around you, or you can exile yourself from participation in mainstream society. 

In a world where you need to accept that you can’t be invisible, the next best thing is camouflage. 

And that’s why identity online is interesting as social media behaviours develop in the mainstream. You likely won’t be able to avoid having your legal name be searchable in a way that is connected to you. But you can establish a persona that you are comfortable with others seeing, a selective layer of your life that you’ve made peace with sharing with others, with the world.

Despite current, justifiable, fears related to privacy, the price of being invisible is too high. Instead, you need to focus on how you’re seen, and by whom.

Lessons from PayPal’s Fiasco

PayPal made a very big mistake.

Paypal realized this, and fixed it. 

But there’s a lot to learn from what happened, and it’s not just about the error made, and not just about the response.

1. Digital / Social needs to own customer service. This is plenty counter intuitive, but it’s the logical move. When something goes wrong in customer service, very wrong, it will almost inevitably become a social media issue. When the team in charge of social doesn’t have this information from the get go, they are unprepared and scrambling to find out what happened, and what the truth is. More important that that, customer service, in my experience, is run with the wrong objective: getting people off the phone, and making complaining more work than it’s worth. Social media, on the other hand, is run with a focus on optics, community building, and the long term effects of each interaction. Every time something gets migrated between a customer service team and a social media team, or vice versa, information and context is lost. There is no ‘private resolution’, anymore. Customer service is a glass house, and the problem isn’t thrown stones, it’s peeping toms.
2. It’s better to be 80% right in 2 hours, than 100% right in 8. A DAY flipped over between Regretsy posting it’s account of what happened, and PayPal correcting and apologizing. It went from December 5th, to December 6th. I don’t have a measurement in hours, but I can tell you it was too many. Even if the account isn’t 100% accurate, it’s obvious enough that this is an issue worthy of quick resolution. I can understand the need for review, revision, getting internal and external alignment, etc, but that’s less important than a response of some kind, admitting fault, and explaining you’re going to fix it. If something public saying ‘This isn’t acceptable, and we’re on it’ had appeared on multiple PayPal owned properties, immediately, this likely would have been less of a disaster. Speed matters, and everyone watching this would do well to try their best and shorten their response timelines for these issues.
3. Terms of Service, User Agreements, etc, need to be written in Plain English. Natural language is key. I understand the value of ambiguity, but this write up of the situation clearly points out that this was not beneficial. If your rules and regulations can’t be written clearly enough to be followed by either your users, or your staff, issues are on you. I understand the value of legal text, and I understand (to an extent) why it is written how it is, but this is wrong, for society as much as for companies and users. Why can’t we enact a simple natural language rule? Creating a series of legal agreements that can only be understood with professional help pretty much guarantees that people will either ignore, or accidentally violate, the rules.

This will happen again, in a few months, as it always does. I will note it, talk about it, and use it to remind myself that things need to change. But in the end, until we start treating every client-facing position as a media-facing position, this stuff will keep happening.

People are media outlets, now. Outsourcing contact with your customers, or lax training of customer service reps, is equivalent to letting interns run your PR department without supervision.

Exclusionary Definition and Actual Personality.

In my last post, I mentioned that I feel too many brands act like pick up artists when it comes to social media.

My suggestion is a solution that eschews an algorithmic approach - my stance is generally that algorithmic approaches don’t do a good enough job when it comes to emulating or replicating something that’s based on complex human behaviour.

(n.b. - when I say complex, I don’t mean complicated.)

While I understand and support the need for brands and agencies to retain control over what is being said, and how, in online spaces, I think a prescriptive approach is deadening, from a verisimilitude standpoint - when you say ‘you must be X,Y,Z’, or even more specifically, ‘you must SAY X,Y,Z’, the chances of the outcome feeling real are slim to none. A way around this is exclusionary definition.

Basically, tell me what we aren’t. Tell me what we don’t say. I’m advocating a practice of essentially outlining a brand’s online taboo system, and thereby creating the bare-bones cultural dynamics that will influence online actions.

Some of these are dead simple: we don’t swear in public, we don’t do anything lewd, we don’t discriminate based on age or influence or looks.

Some of these are more complex: we don’t speak about specific numbers, we don’t identify individual staff by name, we don’t attempt to moderate behaviour by using embarrassment.

While exclusionary definition still includes limitation, it crucially does not define who a community manager or social media representative must be - it merely states what they must not do.

The upshot of this is that if you can explain it, you can ensure it won’t be part of the planning for your community. The downside is that you can’t know that something you didn’t consider will not come up - that’s too bad. This is the price of human interaction.

Developing an actual personality is different. I’m not talking about necessarily using a specific, public-facing individual as the focal point for your brand online. I’m talking about figuring out what you brand would be like as a person, and then outlining that personality for those who are going to be representing it, and interacting with it, online.

This isn’t the same as pulling out a brand pyramid, and saying that your brand essence is your actual personality.

When I think of this, I think of it in the context of a creative exercise that I once read about, in relation to the author Greg Rucka. The gist of it was, he creates entire backstories and explanations of every character he writes. Not just history, but political leanings, favourite authors, music, comedians, opinion on kids, what TV they would and wouldn’t watch, and more crucially, why. 

As an example, Apple’s brand is, in my mind, about focus, quality, simplicity, and innovation. Apple’s personality, however, is about the kind of person who cares about those things, who also often cares about creativity, design, and the optics of what they buy and do. If you’ll notice, Apple interacts with these people directly and socially, they just do it in retail locations, rather than online.

The key thing about a personality is, it is expressed as subtext, through action. Brand messages are tailored to the situations they are expressed in, yes, but they still rely on telling you about what they mean.

A personality is about what you do, what you like, and how you react to things. This is what you need to know as you ask someone to develop a social content strategy for you, because this is what people will actually react to.

Is your brand the kind of person that would post Nyan Cat on their Facebook page, or the kind of person who would share serious links about the clean-up efforts happening in London? What if it’s both?

By nailing down both your taboo system, and your personality, you give those creating and executing your social media strategy the chance to make it actually live, and relate to things outside of your brand’s keywords and upcoming promotions.

And as an added bonus, this offers brands enough control, input and influence, that they don’t need to be hands off, to create a social voice and policy that is both human, and capable of creating meaningful positive associations.

Social Media Marketing and Pick Up Artists.

I realized this morning that about 50% of the brands I follow online are essentially characters from The Game. 

To explain better, sketchy social marketing follows the same process that pick up artists do:

1. find a complex process that some people are naturally good at (in this case, both variations on the human function of socialization). 
2. research successful variations of this process ‘in the wild’ in an attempt to find common patterns and steps that can be tested.
3. take your learnings, and build a few algorithmic approaches, to be tested in real life situations.
4. once you nail down the most statistically successful of these approaches, refine it, apply it constantly, iterate to improve, and continue to plug new variables into your equation with each new situation you meet.

My problem with this approach is that algorithms cannot adequately model realistic human behaviour. We’re still in the uncanny valley for making proper social behaviours, online or otherwise, a regimented process. 

In other words, only people make good people.

The reason I compare this to the world of pick up artists is simple: just because it works doesn’t make it less sketchy. In the same way someone teaching romantically hopeless men a method for picking up women will argue they are ‘leveling the playing field’, agencies and social media practitioners will say that having a tightly designated, non-human-style method of formulating and sharing messages is about ‘finding efficiencies’ and/or ‘representing brands properly’.

My issue with this is that it never ‘levels the playing field’. Much like having a bunch of sketchy guys at a party desperately trying their new techniques to find someone to take home, their increased rate of success ruins the environment. Introducing sketchiness into an ecosystem damages the ability of that ecosystem to respond positively to authentic human behaviour.

Or, once bitten, twice shy.

The solution, of course, is to do the opposite of create an algorithm. Practice exclusionary definition, and develop an actual personality.

This is where I tell you this post is part one of two.

Edit: find part two here

A Tentative Google+ Use Case

Since joining Google+, I’ve learned the three things that seemingly everyone on there is learning:

1. The number one topic on Google+, is Google+
2. Despite the service’s focus on relevance and modeling actual human social grouping, there are still people who think of social connections as ‘points’, and aim for a high score
3. Very few people really know where it fits in, in their social media mix

But I think I’ve cracked it. Google+ is, in part, the solution to Facebook Connect authentication.

Facebook is trying to own identity online. This is what FB connect, and ‘Sign in with Facebook’ buttons are really doing - if your access to a million different things is tied to your Facebook identity, their data set becomes more valuable, and you chances of closing your account decrease to near zero.

The downside of this, is that suddenly Facebook is a public space. Even people like me, who responded to Google+’s circles concept with ‘I already do that with Facebook lists’, start decreasing thier use of Facebook as a place to share - to me, Facebook is turning into it’s namesake; it’s a static page that identifies me, and shares information about what I do elsewhere. Unlike a yearbook, we’re talking about what articles I read on CNN, not whether or not I was in Chess Club, but the idea is the same.

Google+ is far more focused on sharing content, and publishing content as well, to specific networks. Given my current use of Facebook, I don’t think there’s actually any overlap.

Facebook shares a more-or-less static profile, and online activity that you choose to tie to that identity.

Google+ offers a way of publishing content to select groups, but doesn’t really focus on sharing anything about you. Because (spoiler) Google doesn’t give data away. Google stores massive amounts of data, and then uses it behind the scenes to 1) sell things to you, and 2) sell you to things.

So what is Google+?

Google+ is a solution for the fact that status updates and link sharing on FB doesn’t actually make sense anymore, given what Facebook has become.

Free R&D as a cultural movement.

I recently wrote a post regarding Twitter’s use of independent developers as free R&D.  The point was driven home even more strongly during Apple’s WWDC, where many features implemented in iOS 5 were nearly identical to applications or services that already existed - in effect, both cases the company shipped a powerful but unfinished product, and asked third parties, and the user community, to tell them how to fix it.

And then, once value had been mined from the collaboration, it ceased to be a collaboration.

I’ve realized this isn’t just a phenomenon for large companies. Specifically given my experience in social media, the research and thinking time is often offloaded onto the individual, outside of work. The key similarity here is that a space and potential market is found, but those in positions of power are unsure how to create value and profit from that space.

And as a result, you get an industry filled with people like me, for whom digital communications is as much hobby and/or lifestyle as it is profession.

This has me wondering though, is the endgame the same?

Will there be a point where the agencies, consultancies, and corporations feel they’ve learned enough about mining value from online comms and culture that there is no longer that collaboration to explore and define the space?

I’d like to say no. But at the same time, I recognize that there isn’t an answer that would change my behaviour. This is the problem I’m interested in solving right now. How the role of people like me will shift after the problem is solved, is something to tackle in the future.

the meatspace back channel.

Meatspace (noun) colloquial term for physical reality, often used to indicate the contrast between physical and digital reality while challenging the flawed assumption that something cannot be both digital and real at the same time.

Back channel (noun) A secondary layer of conversation; a more private adjunct to the visible public conversation. E.G. Direct Messages are often considered a back channel to a public twitter conversation. Twitter is often considered the back channel to public tech events.

There’s a common flaw in reasoning that needs to be addressed: for a growing number of people, digital experiences aren’t the back channel. Physical interaction has become the back channel of digital conversations conducted in public.

Something you can Google is more public, and in some senses more real, than something you can reach out and touch.

This has serious implications. When I first fell in love with ‘social media’ it was based on the value it served as a back channel - I could communicate with close friends, those who knew where to look, about what was happening in my life. My blog (on livejournal) was limited to friends, and most social sharing was conducted in closed spaces. I would look forward to being able to skip the private background information with friends, and go straight into discussing the impact of events and realizations.

As social media has become more common, and more public, it’s become the ‘public channel’, and in-person interaction has become more precious, and more private.

The digital was once a layer on top of physical lives.

Now digital is what connects all of the different physical and personal interactions of my life into one cohesive story.

The best picture of what my life looks like is available online, connecting sub-units of my existence together. Having a conversation one on one is just the back channel: private, personal, precious, but one facet of a larger picture. You sacrifice totality and comprehensiveness for specificity and focus.

The internet is no longer where people go to be themselves. It’s where each of the ‘selves’ that make up a healthy personality get glued together, and put in context.

On distaste for serial ‘networkers’.

Traditional face-to-face networking can be fairly accurately described as “the cultivation of weak social ties for either personal or professional objectives”, or more colloquially as “looking for people who might be useful”.

People who go to events only to network, generally suck.

I realized recently why I have a problem with this: the technology I work with every day makes cultivating weak social ties in person something of an affront to my values.

Social networks are first and foremost useful for reinforcing and maintaining existing social ties. Secondarily, they are stunningly effective at building weak ties based on industry, professional interests, or skill set. The kind of networking that is done in person has, to an extent, been made obsolete in my life by integrating social media into my day to day interactions.

The reason this is a problem is simple: when I commit to maintaining and cultivating weak ties online as part of my day to day routine, it starts to bother me when someone attempts to form a social tie, based entirely on perceived benefit, in my somewhat limited face-to-face interaction time.

If my time on the Internet isn’t going to be focused entirely on interacting with friends, it bothers me when someone tries to make my in person social time about helping them achieve a business objective.

The best advice regarding networking is not to network; make friends. And when I see the pursuit of weak social ties invading what I consider time with friends, I can get hostile, whether visibly or subtly.