Archive for the ‘New Media’ Category

17
Feb

WTF?! Wednesday: Keep Your Spam to Yourself!

   Posted by: Dawn Tags: , , , ,

“Friends,” we have a problem.

Social networking does many things well — it connects folks with similar interests, it give voices to  individuals and groups that may seem on the fringe, it reconnects friends and family members the world over, it provides ample shared sources for niche interests, and it can even help introduce you to new circles of people and interests.  It’s valuable entertainment.

It’s no surprise, then, that businesses have latched on to social media to try and capitalize on those connections.  Facebook, Myspace (do people still use this?), Youtube, Hulu, and Pandora have built in ads that companies can buy.  On a whole, we as consumers have learned to ignore many of those ads because of their placement (though, I would argue that Hulu is the only one doing this effectively, but that’s another post entirely).  We all knew it would happen, and it did.  Hell, even in the games on Facebook companies are advertising — whether it’s to get additional points through surveys, or like FTD, intrusively placing a billboard right in the game of Restaurant City for Valentine’s Day.  I have no problem with these tactics.  They were to be expected.

People and companies with smaller budgets, however, are treading the dangerous knife-edge of successfully using social media to promote a business and successfully using social media to piss off their clientele and potential customer base.  Here are some tips to help you avoid being a Social Media Nuisance:

Don’t:

  • Send out “page suggestion” invites to every single member of your Friend or Contact list on Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, etc. multiple times.  If they didn’t add it the first time, chances are it was intentional. Multiple invites makes you look desperate, annoying, and like you don’t know the first thing about actually using social media (and therefore, the customer who does). It also shows that you’re not paying attention to them when they say they aren’t interested, and that’s insulting to another “friend.”
  • Get a Twitter account and use it to only vomit links to your web page, or links mentioning you. Social Media is about genuine interaction, and social media users will recognize you for the Spam that you put out. 
  • Automatically sign someone up for your bulk email newsletter because they gave you a business card! Our in-boxes remain the last bastion of privacy we have, and abusing the trust an individual places in you by giving you their email address erases any potential connection and lands you in the Spam filter.
  • Mass invite your contact lists to functions with no regard for their interest.  This goes for entertainers and charities specifically.  Maybe folks “friended” you because you are from their hometown, or because your cousin’s sister-in-law used to date you.  I get spreading your message, but weekly invites turns you into a nuisance.
  • Mistake numbers for popularity!  Having 9 million fans says nothing except that 9 million people would rather click a “join” button than see that same invite 20 more times. 
  • Assume you can be effective because you signed up for every social media service you could find. What you say matters.  A lot.  How you interact matters.  A lot.  Maintaining a positive reputation matters.  A LOT.

 

DO:

  • Interact with your connections!  Have conversations, answer questions, offer up suggestions on topics NOT ABOUT YOU OR YOUR BUSINESS! We’re more likely to recommend our friends and people with faces rather than a massive faceless corporation. 
  • Provide ways to subscribe to your other feeds, web pages, newsletters voluntarily. Chances are if we like you enough to follow you on Twitter or Facebook, we’ll look for you elsewhere.
  • Ask your followers and fans to suggest your services to the friends they have who might share their interest.  It softens the “hard sell” appearance, and you’re more likely to get genuinely interested followers.
  • Connect with individuals who have a track record of helping businesses work with Social media effectively.  If you need suggestions, I have quite a few.  Do your research.  If someone who wants to sell you their services has only numbers of followers on the brain, chances are you’re being had.
  • RESEARCH! There are some incredibly smart people talking about using Social Media effectively, and there’s no reason for someone using the Internet to market their wares/group to be unfamiliar with successful strategies online. 

I hope this is helpful, and certainly these lists aren’t exhaustive.  If you have suggestions, please let me know.  I’m always up for some good conversation on these topics!

If you have “friends” or “connections” that need an intervention, send them the link to this page.  Together we can help people stop embarrassing themselves and save our blood pressure in the process.

1 Comment
21
Oct

Save the comments, save the world

   Posted by: Dawn Tags: , , ,

 

Last week I issued a challenge to friends, readers, and folks who generally lurk in the shadows.  the responses were, themselves, interesting and pretty consistent when it came to explaining why someone may or may not comment on sites or blogs that they read:

  • The point was already made (don’t want to be redundant), and tied to that:
  • Nothing new to add except “I agree”
  • Folks who use RSS readers like Google Reader, find clicking through to the site to comment impedes their likelihood of commenting (though a few comments did mention the different scripts and applications that allow for commenting straight from a reader)
  • It’s time consuming, and tied to that:
  • Marking a post to return to later to pay closer attention to the response often leaves starred items forgotten until much later, if at all
  • Too much time has passed to feel like a comment would be relevant
  • And the most surprising was the number of folks who voiced a fear of sounding less witty, informed, or “intelligent” than the post warranted.

I hope those of you who took on this challenge were able to better estimate your reasons for not commenting, and I hope that by forcing yourself to comment, you were able to expand your own boundaries and shoo away some of those fears! 

 

So…. How did it go?  What did you learn about commenting or your pattern for commenting in the process? What was the experience like? And, perhaps most importantly, will you continue?

4 Comments
13
Oct

Save the Comments!

   Posted by: Dawn Tags: , , ,

Podcamp Pittsburgh 4 was this weekend. 

As you can tell from my previous post, I was excited to go.  Thrilled, in fact.  But by now, you also know that I did not, in fact, get to go back to Pittsburgh for this year’s sold out PCPGH4.  Without going in to the gory details, let’s just say that digestive distress in cats is no joking matter, and it’s one hell of an expensive problem to have. Couple that with the fact that symptoms usually show up too late for any intervention and the need to visit Vet Emergency Hospitals, and you have a very hysterical Dawn worried about her cat and graduate school companion dying because they wanted to hospitalize him for $2500.  At least.  Long story short, we took him home, and complied with the required monitoring of him for 48 hours, and made him as comfortable as possible.  Hell, Jack even went out and bought him a water fountain in the hopes that it would make him feel better and help his water consumption.  ~*sniffle*~

So yeah.  No Podcamp for us.  I’m sad.  I miss YinzTeam as it is, and the opportunity to meet new folks and have discussions that open doors on so many levels come so infrequently anymore that it was just heartbreaking to be sidelined.  Because the crew organizing Podcamp this year was on the ball, I was able to watch a good number of sessions remotely.  But one thing that I noticed almost immediately on Saturday, was that the comments and chat system for the live streaming video stopped working.  I was struck with a whole new level of frustration.  The sessions are inspiring and informative, sure, but Podcamp happens (most innovation and idea hatching, for that matter) during the conversations.  The questions and answers. The discussions.  The panels and debates.  I’ve said it before, and I firmly believe, that Podcamp happens in the hallways.  And here I was completely shut off from the hallway conversations and even from the conversations in the actual sessions!

This all has a point. 

Trust me.  See, one of the things I planned on talking about at PCPGH4 was the culture of commenting.  It’s disappearing.  It’s no longer dwindling; it’s flat out dying.  It ages me to say this, I know, but I remember a time when blogs didn’t come with comment functions (~*gasp*~ I knnnnooowww!!).  And when some coder started passing out free code to insert comment features it exploded the entire notion of what websites and “blogs” were, and of the potential they had.  Suddenly people had interaction on a whole new level! Suddenly, you could rant about just about anything and have your friends and random passers by leave notes of agreement or rebuttal.  You could have a dialogue.

But that’s going the way of the Dodo now, and I think that’s a terrible mistake.  As blogs become more common place, and more and more people post whatever they want whenever they want, they’ve taken the dialogue out of the conversation, and when you do that you no longer have a blog.  You have a basement printed broadside that no one can discuss with you.** 

What happens when no one comments?  Comments and discussion fuel the conversation and development of ideas.  It becomes a tidal wave of thought!  So you may have tons of email responses, or comments on your site.  That’s grand.  But how many comments do you leave on other sites?  Are you closing off your fishbowl by only fostering the culture of commenting on your own site?  Look, I’m as guilty as the rest of you.  I have, sitting in my Google Reader, the dreaded (1000+) unread blog posts.  Some are from news feeds, but a good many of them are blogs just like this one.  I read daily, or weekly, and rarely leave a comment.  Why? 

 

You tell me. 

 

Why do you read (and I know you do.  I see you….)  and not leave comments?  Not just here, but elsewhere?

I’ll make a deal with you.  For one week, starting today, see if you can leave a comment on each blog you read.  It doesn’t have to be every post, but at least leave a thoughtful response indicating that you engaged the post.  Can you do that?  For a week?

I know @BurghBaby is in over at TheBurghBaby.com, and if a working mommy blogger who posts at least once a day, takes care of a zoo, a new house, and a family can do it, can’t you? 

Let me know how it goes.  Remember, we’re all watching. 

 

 

~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~

** I’ve never agreed with closing off comments on blogs.  That’s what makes a blog a blog.  I’ve also never agreed with News sites opening comments on fact based articles.  The news is the news.  It’s not up for debate.  Editorials are for debate.  Letters to the Editor are for debate.  Once you make factual articles something to debate, you undermine their validity and turn your entire news organization into a blog of editorial opinion by the masses and moderated by journalists. News sites are not for discussing ideas and hashing out positions and opinions.  Leave that job to the blogs and message boards.

29 Comments
8
Oct

Podcamp Pittsburgh 4! #PCPGH4

   Posted by: Dawn Tags: , , ,

PocampPittsburgh.com

PocampPittsburgh.com

 

It’s that time of year again folks!  Podcamp Pittsburgh 4 is ready to kick off tomorrow night from 6 pm - 8:30 pm at the AlphaLab for the Meet-n-Greet, and then officially begin Saturday morning (9 am - 4 pm) at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. 

This year I’ll be speaking in two sessions:

Saturday, 10/10/09, 1 PM:

Intellectual Property: What Are Your Ideas Worth?

In this era of “free” Internet content, copyright infringement and rampant plagiarism, who really “owns” an idea? And if you *do* have an idea, is it actually worth anything? Devil’s advocate John Carman moderates this debate about intellectual property changing business models between anti-IP advocates Nick Pinkston & Steve Klabnik and pro-authorship devotees Justin Kownacki & Dawn Papuga.

…and…

Sunday, 10/11/09, 3 PM:

Comments & Criticism: The central nervous system of consumerism

Dawn Papuga of Lyrique Tragedy Reviews (And Reality 101) examines the importance of comments, criticism, and reviews as a means/tool for finding out about topics/books/issues you are interested in but have no idea where to start.

 

The second listing isn’t as descriptive as I would like, but the development of the topic came a little late.  Originally I was planning on doing a fun session on “2009 in MEMEs” but that was waylaid for something more “useful.”  (Not that I disagree!)  I plan to discuss the culture of commenting and its importance to the social media machine, criticism & reviews as a way of expanding your comfort zone through trusted reviewers, and how quality interaction encourages the medium (and us) to grow.

Anthony, over at Bricks and Boxes has been posting wonderful Podcamp Pittsburgh Appetizers featuring some of the speakers, topics, and sessions that will be bouncing around this weekend, and if you have some time before hand, be sure to go check them out!  He put up an Appetizer featuring my second session, and one by Kathleen Danielson.  Go check it out!

I hope to see you there!  Don’t forget to join the PCPGH Flickr group, and tag your content for the weekend as PCPGH4 (or, #PCPGH4). 

:)

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